Quote from: Jackalope;230660Is that supposed to make it okay?

No, I don't think it's OK.  I'm explaining why she does what she does, not saying that I agree with it.

Quote from: Jackalope;230660There are a lot of people in this country with the power to act on the dictum to terrorize liberals and make them afraid to speak out.  It's exactly that sort of language that mobilized the brownshirts that help the Nazis seize power and...terrorize and silence the German left.

Perhaps you missed the part earlier in this thread when I acknowledged that the things pundits say can motivate people to act.  That said, I think you are fooling yourself if you don't think there are places in this country where conservatives are afraid to speak out.

Quote from: Jackalope;230660You say that she's pushing my buttons and it's "funny," but the point you are completely missing, the point you are dancing around, is that kind of hate spewing also pushes the buttons of people like Jim David Adkisson, and now two people are dead.  Hah hah hah!  Funny fucking jokes!

As I've said earlier in the thread, if it can be shown that the words of a particular conservative commentator provoked those murders, I'd have no problem holding the commentator responsible for the incitement.  But what's your solution and where to you draw the line?  Should we ban all hateful speech or only the hateful speech you don't agree with, since you seem to dish out quite of bit of your own?

You complain about the left calling liberals traitors yet you have no problem casually calling conservatives racists and murderers without making any distinction between who you are talking about.  You talk about liberals being terrorized and afraid to speak out and ignore that it's conservatives like Mark Steyn and people like Oriana Fallaci who are being dragged into courts and tribunals over what they've said in Canada and Europe and conservatives who feel afraid to speak out in liberal bastions of the US.  Your concern seems less about general principles like human rights, decency, and free speech but that you don't like being on the receiving end.  

Quote from: Jackalope;230660Hello Red Herring!

No, I didn't think you'd have the guts to answer the question.  You only answer the easy ones, right?

Quote from: Jackalope;230656And again, Ward Churchhill never said that they deserved their fate.

Sure he did:

   As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire, the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved and they did so both willingly and knowingly.

So why is he claiming that the people in the World Trade Center weren't innocent?  Are you really that dense?

Quote from: Jackalope;230656Plus, what the fuck does ward Churchhill have to do with Ann Coulter?  Is Ward Churchill a liberal commentator?  Does Ward Churchhill spend a lot of time on TV, in the public eye, speaking for and representing the left in the public debate?  Um, why, no, no he's not.

You are ignoring that the right and left speak through different venues and mediums.  The left does pretty horribly on talk radio but they also dominate the politics on college campuses and in movies.  Need I remind you that Gabriel Range made a movie called Death Of A President that was premiered at the Toronto Film Festival about the assassination of George W. Bush, a sitting President.  Couldn't that give a left-wing Bush hater ideas about killing the President?  Or how about Alec Baldwin on Late Night with Conan O'Brien during the Clinton impeachment saying:

   If we were living in another country, what we, all of us together, would go down to Washington and stone Henry Hyde to death, stone him to death, stone him to death!  Then we would go to their house and we'd kill the family, kill the children.

I can also give you some hateful quotes from Air America if you really want but that would miss the point, which is that there is plenty of hate spewing from the left, too, but because of your own biases, you either don't notice it or think it's justified.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656He's a super far left idiot with a position at a shitty little school who once got in the news for making an insensitive (but not entirely wrong) comment.

So you agree with him that the people in the World Trade Center were not innocent victims?  Either you are an innocent victim or you aren't.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656There's a HUGE difference between Ward Churchill writing an essay on "the natural propensity of chickens" that got noted in the media once, and Ann Coulter speaking on behalf of the right wing for over a decade now.

You'll notice that Ann Coulter was let go from National Review for her forced conversion crack and you'll also notice that she doesn't have her own talk show.  There are reasons for that.  And if you consider that there are people with ideas like Ward Churchill's on almost every campus and that they have significant influence over students by virtue of required attendance and grading, the influence is not as disparate as you want to suggest.  

Quote from: Jackalope;230656There is absolute no reason why I should have to defend Ward Churchill, except that you are pathetically desperate to change the subject.  He's irrelevant to this conversation.  He doesn't speak for liberals, he isn't presented as speaking for liberals by anyone EXCEPT right wingers

If there is no reason why you should have to defend him, then why did you offer a qualified defense of his views ("not entirely wrong")?  

What's funny here is that you are upset that conservatives claim Churchill speaks for liberals yet you have no problem standing on the other side and claiming that Ann Coulter speaks for conservatives.  She doesn't.  Nor does Michael Savage.  Even Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have their critics on the right and most conservatives don't even consider Bill O'Reilly a real conservative.  So if you think it's unfair that every asinine thing that someone on the left says gets hung around the necks of all liberals, then maybe you shouldn't be so quick to hang every asinine thing that someone on the right says around the necks of all conservatives.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656Well, that's how he got the figure.

Source?  I'm curious because that's not what the anti-Limbaugh sites that I looked at said.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656I have photos of Seattle from when my grandmother was a kid.  The entire area in the photo, with the exception of one hourse, is thick, deep forest.

Was your grandmother a kid when Native Americans ran the area?  I suspect you didn't even look at the links I offered so, here, let me quote one for you that will explain the point you are obviously missing:

   [A]nthropologist Jay Miller went into the Methow Valley [north-central Washington] with a van load of [Methow Indian] elders, some of whom had not been there for fifty years. When we had gone through about half the valley, a woman started to cry. I thought it was because she was homesick, but, after a time, she sobbed, 'When my people lived here, we took good care of all this land. We burned it over every fall to make it like a park. Now it is a jungle. Every Methow I talked to after that confirmed the regular program of burning.

...and...

   Like the rest of the Americas, the environment of the Pacific Northwest was not pristine when Europeans first encountered it. It was actively managed and shaped by the hand of its native inhabitants. The primary tool of this indigenous, non-agricultural environmental management was fire. Native Americans used fire purposefully and in patterns that reflected a traditional ecological knowledge that was both broad and deep.

Throughout the pre-White Pacific Northwest, Indian cultures used fire in different yet internally consistent ways. In the "interior valleys province," between the Coast and Cascade ranges, repeated firing maintained open prairie lands where the native peoples' most important wild plant foods grew. In the Columbia Basin, regular firing held back the growth of sagebrush and promoted the growth of bunchgrasses and forbs. Anthropogenic burning kept the understories of the ponderosa pine forests open and extended into higher elevation, dry eastern forests where fire use was spottier. Along the Cascade crest, Indian-caused fires maintained mountain huckleberry patches, and in the upper Fraser highlands it promoted the growth of important root crops. Along the wet coastline, burning was less common, though locally intense, and mostly associated with the regeneration of various species of wild berries.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656Now it's Capitol Hill, and one of the most populated neighborhoods in Seattle.  In my own lifetime, I've watched the amount of greenspace around Seattle shrink as the city expanded, and watched large tracts of former forest turn into clearcuts for development.

How old were the trees that were clearcut?  What was that foliage in that area like 300-400 years ago, before the Native Americans largely died out?

Quote from: Jackalope;230656By the time Europeans arrived in America, they had developed timber intensive  construction and manufacturing technologies that require a lot of wood (even the word lumber originates in the 1700s, according to a source I was reading earlier today).

You seem to assume that the Native Americans didn't destroy forests because they didn't have lumber.  They weren't logging them.  They were burning them to create pastures.  The net result is the same, grasslands rather than forests.  Go back and follow the links I provided earlier for more details or do your own Google searches if you want.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656Trying to pretend that massive deforestation didn't follow European advancement is ridiculous.  What's the point?  We all know that the Europeans built far more and far larger wooden structures than the natives.  We know that it was Europeans that initiated the lumber trade.  We know the Europeans used clear-cut farming techniques.  We know that European farming techniques produced more food and thus higher populations and this combined with the greater need for wood to fuel the more developed technologies lead to a much higher wood usage index.

So you don't think regular burnings of woodlands can cause massive deforestation?  No, the Native Americans weren't cutting the trees down and using the lumber to build with.  They were burning the forests down regularly to create grasslands and prairies for game and so that other plants would grow.  The trees are just as gone if they are burned as if they are cut.  And of course plenty of trees have been killed in the Cascades by volcanoes, too.  

Quote from: Jackalope;230656So what, the beavers all got killed by trappers, and then the forests overgrew?

Yes.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656Do....do you have any idea how incredibly stupid that sounds?

Only to someone who doesn't have a clue about how widespread beavers were or what their impact was on the environment.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656I dunno, my step-mother was the curator of education at a zoo, and I grew up around biologists, and love critters of the pacific northwest, of which the beaver is a fine and prominent representative.  And the notion that you would blame poor lowly mr. beaver when there is US to consider is pretty fucking ridiculous.

Because as many as 400 million beavers who constantly gnaw down saplings and flood acres of lands with their dams couldn't possibly do as much damage to trees as 350 million human beings, right?  Of course the elimination of those dams changed a lot of ecosystems, too.  The question is one of what you want to consider "normal" for North America.  

Quote from: Jackalope;230656Yeah, that so has nothing at all to do with the concerns that he was attempting to refute.  Pristine or not, there was more forest even 100 years ago, and the lack of forest leads to serious watershed and erosion issues that  need to be addressed, not ignored.  And his argument was essentially "There are more trees now then there were then, so obviously these treehuggers are just Chicken Littles."

The point you are missing is that the environment today isn't the environment of 100 years ago and that environment wasn't the environment of 400 years ago.  Further, erosion and watershed issues also happen naturally.  Remember, you live below a volcano that periodically erupts and sends massive lahars tearing down to the ocean destroying almost everything in their wake.  You seem to want a static environment and the environment isn't static.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656meanwhile, in the real world, we here in Washington were just dealing with a battle between land developers and farmers.  The developers wanted to clear cut an entire hillside to make apartment complex overlooking a quaint little farming community.  Said community was concerned that it might not seem so quaint once they strip the hill of its natural watershed and the flooding and mudslides begin -- which is exactly what has happened every other time developers have done this in Washington.

This is all a problem because people don't want the land to change.  That the farmers don't want their farms to be flooded or covered in mud is a personal and economic issue rather than an environmental one.  When the lahars and ash clouds come pouring down on them, as they inevitably will at some point on much of Washington State, it will all be moot, won't it?  

Quote from: Jackalope;230656Yeah, he's a windbag.  A lying, hypocritical, chickenhawk, racist windbag.

He's a windbag.  He's been hypocritical on a few issues but no more than most other people are.  Chickenhawk?  So should we institute a system like Starship Troopers where only those who serve in the military get a vote or voice?  Racist?  Hardly, though he's certainly politically incorrect.  James Golden (his right-hand man Bo Snerdly) is black, he lets Walter Williams (black economist) guest host is program, and his last wedding was performed by Clarence Thomas (with James Carville in attendance) which would all be pretty strange behavior for a racist.

Quote from: Jackalope;2306561. If the situation is getting better, it is BECAUSE of the very people Limbaugh attacks as being the real problem.

You are certain of that?

Quote from: Jackalope;2306562. That's fucking idiotic John.  I mean seriously, you are in utter and absolute denial of reality here.

No, the problem is that you are looking at local changes that you don't like and (A) assume that the way things were 50 years ago is the way they were 500 years ago (not true) and (B) that the rest of America is following the same trends your area is.

Quote from: Jackalope;230656The few times I've watched Hannity, I've never been able to watch for more than a few minutes.  He's such an unhumorous blowhard, and his arguments are so full of very obvious and simple logical errors that I find him to be a detriment to the overall public debate.

That doesn't make him a hater or a bigot.  If you want to call right-wing talk show hosts blowhards, uninformed, or wrong, that's fine.  But that's not what you are doing.  How is casually tossing around charges of racism any better than casually tossing around charges of treason?

Quote from: Jackalope;230656The American policy of interring tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans was a racist policy.  Attempting to justify the policy at this point is de facto racist apology. End of discussion.

In various threads about Robert E. Howard, people have tried to excuse the racism in his work in various ways (often saying that he was a product of his time and wasn't so bad) despite the fact that it's pretty clear from sentiments that he expressed in private letters that he held some pretty vile racist views, even by the standards of his day.  Should I assume that everyone who tries to stick up for Howard are racists or are defending racism or would that be unfair?

John, you're fucking insane, and I'm done talking to you.

Quote from: Jackalope;230833John, you're fucking insane, and I'm done talking to you.

You really don't want to answer that Ayers question, do you?

Actually CU is not that shitty or little. I went there and then got into a top ten graduate school for my discipline. It ranks in the top 100 schools at around #70 in the US. Certainly, it's no Harvard, but it's not a shit school either.

Quote from: John Morrow;230629How do you feel about Bill Ayers who was involved in a group that tried to murder the family of a New York State Supreme Court Justice and bomb a dance on a military base, was never prosecuted, and wrote and sold his memoir about his life as a fugitive and doesn't seem terribly repentant about it?  As bad as Coulter, worse than Coulter, or not as bad as Coulter?

He's worse than Coulter.  The people who praise him and look up to him, are comparable to Coulter.  IMO.

I dunno, I am definitely not a left-winger, but Coulter freaks me out.  Hell, sometimes I think she's actually right about stuff.  After 9/11 the US would have done a lot better with a Jacksonian smash-some-heads-together response, not this Wilsonian "All Arabs want Freedom, and we'll prove it if we have to kill a million of 'em" approach which has killed far more people, both middle-Eastern and American.    Now, she went well beyond smash-some-heads-together, and many on the Right can't seem to distinguish between Jacksonian righteous vengeance and hyper-Wilsonian Perpetual Global War for Perpertual Freedom, but she did have half a point there.  That doesn't excuse her kill-the-Liberals rhetoric.  For one thing, she and a big chunk of the US Right can't seem to distinguish between moderate liberals and the Maoists.  All that crap about the 'extreme leftist' Hillary Clinton meant they took way too long to notice Obama actually did have some dubious connections.

It was worth reading the entirety of John's posts just to see Jackalope get totally owned.

His casually dismissal of the beavers was rather funny to me as I'm the environmental compliance pika for my organization and one of the things we learned in the class for that was that the parent organization was involved in a massive war against the local beavers... both tearing out their dams that were destroying the local ecology (including the salmon spawning streams) and shooting the buggers to keep the population in check.

Of course, its somewhat laughable for anyone in western washington to bitch about massive deforestation.  If you've ever been here you'll understand why its silly.

Of course, its also silly for anyone in Nebraska to claim that (not that anyone did...) as the only trees in that state were planted by europeans as part of the Arbor Day Foundation (which has its origins in... you guessed it... Nebraska).

There was an anecdote about a New England state (New Hampshire?) that is massively forested, almost impenetrably at some points, something about the difficulty of getting to a crashed plane, whatever... and they revealed in the news story that 100 years ago the entire state was one big farmland... the forests are new.

Of course: the US spends a great deal of money fighting bursh fires nation wide, and wildfires that burn 'billions' of dollars every couple years... but if we left those damn brush fires alone (controlled burns, such as I used to see in North Carolina are a costly way of getting the same result...) the wildfires would be far more managable....

Spending money to create a means of spending even more money.... go us...

Quote from: Jackalope;230833John, you're fucking insane, and I'm done talking to you.

No, he's often times annoying, not insane.

In this instance, however, I loved watching John Morrow go to work on you.


- Ed C.

Quote from: Spike;230875It was worth reading the entirety of John's posts just to see Jackalope get totally owned.

A bunch of red herring arguments hardly constitutes getting "owned."

I'm tried of arguing with idiots like John Morrow.  I'm tired of dealing with the bullshit assumptions that underlie their stupid pathetically predictable arguments.

John Morrow's argument rests on the assumption the the following analogy is valid:


or:


This is a ridiculous analogy.  There is absolute no reason to engage in conversation with someone so facile and disingenous as to make these sorts of analogies.

Neither Ward Churchhill or Bill Ayers is a pundit, neither of them is trotted out by the left establishment to act as a spokesperson.   Most liberals haven't even heard of these men.   In fact, I -- a nominal liberal -- only know of these two men because of the attention conservatives have brought to them.  I know of Ann Coulter because of the attention conservatives have brought to her.

This is the very definition of a red herring.  It's an attempt to deflect criticism of major spokesperson of the right wing by pointing at fringe leftists who aren't being promoted as spokespeople for anyone.

The entire thing about beavers and deforestation is another red herring.  It's just a way of avoiding the actual issue I raised:  Rush Limbaugh is a disingenuous manipulator of facts who distorts reality to serve his agenda.

This kind of crap is exactly why I have no respect for right-wingers.

Actually Jack, by that standard, you are using Ann Coulter as a Red Herring.

See, whenever John or any other conservative makes a reasonable post, you go right back to Ann Coulter, quote some egregious shit, then hype it up to actually make it even worse, then you do your little happy dance and hoot like a monkey declaring victory.

Which is why no one here (a mostly liberal site at that...) has any respect for you.

Quote from: Spike;230983Actually Jack, by that standard, you are using Ann Coulter as a Red Herring.

See, whenever John or any other conservative makes a reasonable post, you go right back to Ann Coulter, quote some egregious shit, then hype it up to actually make it even worse, then you do your little happy dance and hoot like a monkey declaring victory.

I have never mentioned Ann Coulter before this thread, which is ostensibly about right wing commentators, and thus would make her a fair topic of conversation.  I'm not even the one who brought her up.

You are an idiot, Spike.  A complete and total idiot.  No wonder you're a right-winger.

(And I actually agree with right-wingers when they make reasonable posts, even when many liberals don't.  For example, I don't think gleichman is an idiot or a racist simply because he is concerned about immigration, and while I ultimately disagree with him, I don't think he is entirely off-base in his concerns.  I've also agree with Morrow on several occasions, I jut think that right now he is being an utter douchebag by trying to equate Coulter and Ayers, as if they were remotely analogous.)

I'll give you that Ayers and Coulter aren't in the same league. Coulter never once tried or succeeded in killing anyone.

Nor is she as crazy as Farrakhan.

Quote from: Jackalope;230987I have never mentioned Ann Coulter before this thread, which is ostensibly about right wing commentators, and thus would make her a fair topic of conversation.  I'm not even the one who brought her up.

Yet you repeatedly return to her like a junkie looking for his next fix in this very thread.   Nice attempt to deflect criticism, however. You may have a glorious career ahead of you in politics one day, if you ever learn when to shut your mouth.

QuoteYou are an idiot, Spike.  A complete and total idiot.  No wonder you're a right-winger.

Aw... I was hoping you'd threaten to hit me again. I was all set to PM you my address too....  I guess I'll have to make do with insults and mischaracterization.  

Quote(And I actually agree with right-wingers when they make reasonable posts, even when many liberals don't.  For example, I don't think gleichman is an idiot or a racist simply because he is concerned about immigration, and while I ultimately disagree with him, I don't think he is entirely off-base in his concerns.  I've also agree with Morrow on several occasions, I jut think that right now he is being an utter douchebag by trying to equate Coulter and Ayers, as if they were remotely analogous.)

You know... if you really want to type out a paragraph explaining how 'some of my friends are....X' you don't need to put it into paranthesis.   As Shewolf pointed out, Ayers is a murderer, Coulter just talks. They aren't analogous, true.

As you seem to think that they aren't analogous because Coulter is a Conservative Pundit and Ayers is just some shmuck who votes liberal... let me enlighten you, you simpering fool you. Ayers was quite the newsmaker recently as he is a promanent supporter of Barrack Obama, and was being lauded by the DNC and several liberal instituitions... I believe he's been since sidelined as it became something of an embarrassment when his 'credentials' as a terrorist, retired or not, started being brought up.  

Ayers donates, gives speeches and writes books on behalf of liberal causes and politicians.  What, precisely, makes him different in this regard from Ann Coulter other than you like his politics?

Spike is a right-winger?

 Spike?


Huh.

 Never knew that.


- Ed C.

Quote from: shewolf;230989I'll give you that Ayers and Coulter aren't in the same league.

More importantly, they aren't in the same career.  Bill Ayers hasn't made thousands of television appearances of liberal media outlets to represent the liberal viewpoint.  Bill Ayers is not a prominent public figure.  Defending Ann Coulter's outrageous behavior by pointing to Bill Ayers is a red herring, a digression and diversion away from the actual topic: Ann Coulter.

If Spike started a thread about Bill Ayers, demanding to know how liberals could tolerate him, and I entered that conversation and demanded that Spike defend Adolph Hitler -- who was a right-winger and far worse than Bill Ayers by any measure -- before I would acknowledge any criticism of Bill Ayers, that would clearly be a red herring argument.  Yet this is all right-wingers ever do when one of their own is criticized: point to someone on the left that is not remotely analogous, and demand that the liberal questioning their right wing wunderkind defend that person first.  it's such irrational bullshit, and yet it's all right-wingers seem to be able to offer.

Like you, bringing up Farrakhan, as if Louis Farrakhan is representative of liberals.  I mean what the fuck?

There are plenty of left/liberal analogues to Ann Coulter:  Al Franklin comes immediately to mind.  James Carville is another.  Of course, none of them comes close to spewing the sort of hate-filled invective that Coulter spews, so right-wingers don't point to these actual analogs, they point to fringe weirdos like Ward Churchill and people like Bill Ayers who aren't prominent, aren't representative, and don't purport to speak for the liberal establishment.