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Dad posted:This, friends, sums up reality! Quite interesting that "the Wizard of Id", with it's record of off beat humor, was chosen as the vehicle fgor this message. Really? Really!? I would like to respond with the following, but somehow I feel like it's too antagonistic to really be effective: TehSaurus posted:Start with a straw man, add a fundamental misunderstanding of class mobility, wealth distribution, and motivation, mix with ignorance and selfish disregard for the plight of your fellow man, and what do you get? In my actual reply I definitely want to include the philosophy/motivation link mentioned earlier, and some stuff about the drug war and class warfare and wealth distribution, but I'm pretty sure it's all a total waste of .
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# ¿ Aug 26, 2009 14:50 |
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# ¿ May 6, 2024 02:29 |
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Paranda posted:It just saddens me that no matter how good the replies are, they will probably be ignored. Has anyone here actually succeeded in winning someone over? See, this is the real problem. They send some contentless jab about a retarded talking point (in this case, "gently caress poor people") and are literally immune to any facts or evidence to the contrary. I just want to lash out in some completely non-constructive way just to elicit any kind of response, hoping that it might actually get them to reconsider their criminal ignorance. Unfortunately, the whole thing is just counter productive. I had an uncle tell me literally that my argument was less valuable because I was more educated. It's so retarded.
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# ¿ Aug 26, 2009 21:22 |
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Got this one today:Dad posted:
The reply is. Son posted:Allow me to make some corrections:
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2009 16:04 |
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Strudel Man posted:doesn't even make any kind of cogent argument. Sadly, if you're trying to make a cogent argument with the people who send these, you've likely already lost.
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# ¿ Nov 19, 2009 14:18 |
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Strudel Man posted:If you truly believe a person cannot be convinced, I don't see what benefit there is to engaging with them at all. In my experience these folks (mostly my family, but some other individuals as well) have their political beliefs wound so tightly with their personal identity that they are completely unable to think rationally about it. My comment was probably unnecessarily flip, because ultimately making sound arguments is the only thing we can do. However, it is frustrating to continually and politely engage people on these subjects when the only repayment is facerolling of the keyboard until they find the forward key. To contribute: No You Shut The gently caress Up Dad! posted:Subject: Fwd: FW: It's Called Christmas! Basically he gets super pissed anytime someone says Happy Holidays because you know, Christian nation and all that. The youtube is just some video claiming that Jesus has sole rights to the Solstice holiday. I'd avoid it. My response: TehSaurus posted:In order to preserve your originalist interpretation of Christmas, may I suggest you also protest against the following holiday customs: I admit my reply wasn't really constructive, but he's utterly hopeless, and I'm tired of wasting in the face of willful ignorance.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2009 15:43 |
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That was awesome, I sent it to my dad so that maybe he'll have something positive to send around. Who could have thought a chain letter could be both positive and pro-Christian?
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# ¿ Dec 4, 2009 14:59 |
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I bring to you, dear goons, the healthcare e-mail rebuttal subthread. I've been having a number of conversations about the topic with various people over e-mail, and I thought that it might be helpful to some of you to provide replies that you can copy and paste to educate your friends and family when they start blarghing on about how retarded they are. Feel free to make suggestions or distribute this in any way you find helpful. Edit: In case it wasn't clear, I'm including these because I think they're useful as I have not found similarly thorough replies pre-packaged for my use. If, in fact, such replies exist, please send me to them, because creating these is a lot of effort. First edition: Tort reform! Mongoloid Retard posted:Tort reform!!!!~ BLARRGH LITIGOOUS SOCIALEST BLARGH BLARGH BLARGH! A convenient prepackaged reply posted:The first thing we have to do a sanity check. We have to compare the total cost of torts with the total cost of healthcare to figure out if it is possible to make a meaningful difference. There are a couple of studies (included at the end) that cite tort costs for 2005 at $30 billion and $11.5 billion. Both studies use different methods to get there, and neither is contested by advocates of tort reform. Contrasting that with the $1.9 trillion spent on healthcare in the same year the emphasis on tort reform seems ridiculous. So how has the issue managed to get traction? TehSaurus fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Dec 7, 2009 |
# ¿ Dec 7, 2009 18:39 |
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jackpot posted:Next up: Remembering Shiloh, and possibly Remembering the Battle of Long Island. Ask him if he's asked for forgiveness for dropping the bomb.
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# ¿ Dec 7, 2009 23:07 |
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:Apparently rightwingers all have this recollection of Obama caming out whooping and screaming "I GOT HIM, BOYS, IT WAS ME ME ALL ME! I PARADROPPED IN FROM THE INTERNATIONAL loving SPACESTATION AND BEAT BIN LADEN TO DEATH WITH MY PENIS!" I think they all had a collective hallucination. There is a small part of me that wishes that is actually what happened. Why yes, I am four years old, how did you know?
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# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 15:45 |
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PerniciousKnid posted:Hey, median individual income is around $25k. So it takes more like one month. I just posted this to my facebook as "The average American CEO makes more in one month than the average American soldier makes in their entire lives." It's probably not quite accurate, but I think it's close enough and also wraps in ARE TROOPS. We'll see if I get any bites.
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# ¿ Aug 10, 2011 22:38 |
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Manifest Dynasty posted:Prediction: "Millions of Americans depend on the jobs that CEO creates!" Yeah, so far it's just my liberal friends vomiting all over it because it's so disgusting. Someone else threw out teachers as another profession 560 times less valuable than a CEO. I think the more conservative members of the audience will probably refrain. I want to throw out a follow up on the top 400 earners paying 17% taxes but I can't find something conveniently definitive that indicates that as a lower percentage than what the average soldier pays.
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# ¿ Aug 11, 2011 15:00 |
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I got some crazy ravings from my uncle the other day:Uncle Crazy Man posted:http://www.morningstartv.com/oak-initiative/marxism-america Just try and imagine the formatting. Think 20 point font or whatever. Anyway, in the following discussion I learned something that made me facepalm harder than I think anything that ever came out of one of these discussions. My uncle always says I should read 1984 in the same breath as "Oh no, socialism!" I never read 1984, but I was curious because I didn't ever recall it being a cornerstone of conservative thought. Now I wasn't going to read a whole book just so I could rebut my crazy uncle, but I decided that it was worth a fifteen minutes on Wikipedia. Anyone familiar with 1984 must see where this is going by now. tl;dr: My uncle literally thinks that Ingsoc* is socialism. The sudden understanding of the subject matter combined with the level of wrongness was just more than I could deal with. *Ingsoc is a hypothetical ideology resulting from totalitarian establishment perverting socialist revolution into pretty much the total opposite of socialism. Disclaimer: It's totally possible that I got this all wrong on account of not actually having ever read 1984, but it seemed pretty clear from the bit that I've read on Ingsoc, the book, and Orwell himself. Feel free to correct me if that's the case.
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2011 21:15 |
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Yeah, that was pretty much what I got out of all of it. The realization though. Man, I don't know that I've ever experienced such a moment.
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2011 21:47 |
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Amarkov posted:No, it was entirely about totalitarianism. To the extent that socialist ideas were even brought up, it was to show how Ingsoc had rejected and corrupted them. I think my uncle actually believes that Ingsoc is the express goal of socialist revolution.
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2011 22:11 |
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I got one yesterday from my Uncle. I haven't seen it posted here before but I thought it was pretty hilarious:My Retarded Uncle posted:Subject: Fw: Parade floats Sensing the hilarity potential of an appeal to authority argument based on a European nation coming from a conservative I whipped up a quick zinger. TehSaurus posted:Yeah if only we had a public healthcare system with mandatory participation for nearly everyone paid for by a 15.5% payroll tax like the Germans maybe they wouldn't laugh at us so much. Of course, since when have Real Americans cared what other countries thought of them. I've also taken the liberty of collecting "forward debt." That is, whenever someone forwards me something inane I feel entitled to send them something from Credo, or RAN, or maybe just something silly. This time I collected with something from the Atheist and the Bear thread. The one where the professor turns into a holy avatar and does battle with Dawkins and his seven scaled heads. I think that's about fair.
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# ¿ Dec 2, 2011 18:40 |
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Keshik posted:Are they brain damaged? That is literally the United States Military. What the gently caress is wrong with these people.
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# ¿ Dec 8, 2011 18:25 |
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ts12 posted:Horror. This guy is a literal monster, who would marry him? I unironically hope he gets metastatic pancreatic cancer and dies or maybe prostate cancer or something. Really he is a horrible human being.
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2011 18:15 |
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rscott posted:Did Bill Gates even write that or is that another one of those random screeds with some famous name attached to it? Really? How long have you been reading this thread? You must know the answer to this by now.
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2011 23:22 |
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Nice receipt, terrorist! Also pretty sure you made the right move Defenestration. While some good points were made regarding your particular rhetoric, I'm confidant that particular issue wasn't going anywhere because drat blacks stealing my tax money or whatever. In other news I got this one from my dad (formatting and AMERIKKKA pictures removed): No you shut the gently caress up dad! posted:
Obligatory response: TehSaurus posted:In this case I'd encourage you and Bud to take the "waterboarding challenge." Can you beat the 14 second average posted by the CIA officers subjected to it? His only response was that he didn't mean to send it to me and only included me by mistake. I'm not sure if that's progress or not.
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# ¿ Jan 11, 2012 17:18 |
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Sarion posted:Your response: "So you know it's a terrible thing to be passing around, and are rightly ashamed of it, but you do it anyways?" or maybe "So, what you're saying is we should be more like North Vietnam?" I've actually pulled out the North Vietnam argument on that bullshit immigration e-mail. I literally said "If North Vietnam is so great why don't you move there?" and the response betrayed a complete inability to understand what I was getting at. It was beautiful and horrible at the same time. I'm thinking about sending him the op-eds written by the former Guantanamo detainees in the other threads just to try and get him to humanize these people but I know it's a lost cause so I'll just be depressed that my dad is literally worse than a torture apologist. I don't know if he'll read the link that I put in the reply, but I'll never know what he thinks about it even if he does. It's kind of like a weird emotional void. If he catches me on a bad day I'll give some pretty LF style responses just in an effort to provoke any kind of response. I really don't get it.
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# ¿ Jan 11, 2012 17:53 |
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Sarion posted:Yeah it was Hitchens. He did an article on it for Vanity Fair. Also some shock jock did it on air and there is a video of it on youtube. Both of those and yet another guy are referenced in the link I sent him. It's in the post I made if you guys want more detail about how horriffic waterboarding actually is. I honestly didn't know what it was beyond simulated drowning, which is enough for my reptile brain to say "No, that is horrible, why would you do that to a living breathing person." Reading that link explains in great detail the mechanics and how to duplicate it. For those unaware, the short version is that it fills your upper respritory tract (nose, mouth, sinuses, larynx) with water. Apparently the larynx has a very strong fear response to this which is why everyone who has tried it has had such a dramatic reversal. Anyway, yeah, it's horrible.
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# ¿ Jan 11, 2012 18:12 |
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Arglebargle III posted:TBF the medal isn't for popping out a fetus, it's for raising a child to adulthood. If the kid dies you don't get the achievement. Whether the death is your fault doesn't measure into it. Goddamn escort missions. Idiot AIs always getting themselves killed.
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# ¿ Jan 13, 2012 17:27 |
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More facebook/maher/limbaugh chat. When I posted about Limbaugh being terrible someone mentioned Letterman and Maher. Here was my response:TehSaurus posted:While the attacks leveled by Letterman (and others) against Palin are indeed offensive, trying to equate the criticism of an individual who deliberately cultivates a controversial public presence with a statement marginalizing an entire class of people for nothing more than seeking access to necessary medical care is pretty disingenuous and is not something I'm willing to entertain. Am I just defending my own bias here, or is the distinction between the two comments justified? I really feel like there's a difference between attacking a class of people and an individual, even though the angles of attack are abhorrent in both cases. Reading the last few pages of the thread I get the feeling that these cases aren't really as distinct as I think they are. Am I out of line?
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# ¿ Mar 13, 2012 16:23 |
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zeroprime posted:For one, they're making a false equivalency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence. The most offensive aspect of what Limbaugh said didn't even include any profanity or misogynistic slur words. That is exactly what I was trying to point out, that it was a false equivalence. I try and avoid using logical argument gotchas like ad homs and such, so I avoided calling it out as that specifically. I'm just concerned that maybe it isn't as obviously false as I was inclined to believe in my first reaction.
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# ¿ Mar 13, 2012 17:10 |
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http://thepeoplescube.com/current-truth/communists-sue-democratic-party-for-stealing-platform-t5149.html Anyone seen this before? I got it from my idiot uncle and there's so much wrong with it I don't really know where to start. I assumed there'd be at least a fact check somewhere that I could reference to deal with the stuff that's obviously ridiculous but nothing is showing up. I'm tempted to tell him that I'm a communist. Literally the same people he was shooting to death in Vietnam. Also, as such I'm super excited to hear about American progressives taking hints from the CPUSA.
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# ¿ Apr 3, 2012 03:34 |
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Shasta Orange Soda posted:People normally don't take time to debunk an obvious humor article on an obvious humor site with obvious jokes in the article, and a column full of obvious joke article titles to the right of the article. And also the quote "A Stalinist Version of The Onion! - Rush Limbaugh" to the left of the article. I mean, drat. Wow okay. That'll do what I need I think. Not sure why I didn't notice that, but thanks!
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# ¿ Apr 3, 2012 13:15 |
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# ¿ May 6, 2024 02:29 |
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constantIllusion posted:Holy poo poo, the graphics. Oh my god. It's more than I could have possibly hoped for. Time for sickburnz! TehSaurus posted:And what am I supposed to take away from this, exactly? See, I couldn't be sure that he didn't know it was satire. I really wanted him to be explicit about it. Uncle posted:Just to remind you how much the Democratic party has deteriorated over the years. They don't even have to run a separate candidate for president now. The Dems are doing for them willingly. Did they teach that in college? You scoffed at me when I said Obama was the most unamerican president we have ever had. Which communist country has a better record for human rights and a better standard of living than the U.S.? Oh thats right. None! People come here for a better standard of living, the chance to excel and visit for better health care. So, right, totally doesn't know that it's satire, literally thinks modern day Democrats are communists. Also proud enough of that reply to copy my parents, apparently. Here's the reply I'm currently toying with. TehSaurus posted:You know what else they taught me in college? How to tell satire from reality. Maybe you should give it a try. Then maybe you'll never have to look this stupid again. I'm willing to entertain other sickburn options if anyone feels so inclined. This guy is really completely impervious to reason so I pretty much just pillory him whenever he sends me something retarded like this. I'll give it a couple of hours before I send whatever you generate off. e: This is the same uncle who thought that IngSoc from 1984 was literally socialism, so bonus points for working that in somehow. TehSaurus fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Apr 3, 2012 |
# ¿ Apr 3, 2012 20:44 |