Maybe, Pat, you should just tell them to buy a vowel.
Funny, I find that people that think and live like me are better able to make informed choices, too. Gee, what are the odds?!
My tagline says it all.
When confronted by a avid liberal wanting to argue, I always remember my father telling me; "son, why punch a skunk when he already stinks?"
I gave it up simply because they are simply incapable of logical thought. You can show them through court case, statistics, and physical evidence how they are wrong and it will do you no good. You may as well be talking to a fence post.
don't give up on them all...certain of them might be able to realize, eventually, that they've been laboring under a number of false premises.
My liberal Jewish m-i-l wants Terri to die because she hates the Schindlers and the Christian right because they want abortions stopped. She actually SAID these things.
And inner-city gang members who live in large urban areas travel a lot? Are known for being widely read? Can speak multiple languages? And are known for making informed choices?
Eventually those who attempt to reason someone out of an opinion that they haven't first reasoned themselves into, will realize what a waste of time that is.
"There is no arguing that classical IQ, as measured by most intelligence tests, is important in our personal, academic, and professional success. However, emotional intelligence [maturity] matters as much as the classical IQ. One could almost say that emotional intelligence [maturity] is a prerequisite for the proper development and actualization of our other intellectual abilities." ~ Unknown
"...when Supreme Court Justices become worse than Hitler and when those who vote a certain way do so because they’re idiots, it’s time to talk about the weather." - Pat Sajak
"Why do they hate us?" The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe -- because no one else could be such a fool. ~ Thomas Sowell
Infallible haters? Thomas Sowell
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com --
ANYBODY can be mistaken -- except haters, apparently.
Whenever others express their hatred of Americans, in words or deeds, the hand-wringers among us want us to ask: "Why do they hate us?"
Apparently we should automatically go in quest of those "root causes" so dear to the ideology of the left, instead of realizing that many people in less fortunate countries find hating Americans easier than facing the truth about themselves.
Long before September 11th, the Taliban demonstrated again and again their intolerance and hatred of all who differed from them, clamping a reign of terror on the Afghan people and demolishing ancient Buddhist statues, despite worldwide pleas to spare those artistic treasures.
What had the Buddhists or their statues ever done to them?
What did the Jews ever do to Hitler?
The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe -- because no one else could be such a fool.
Unfortunately, we have a large supply of both amateur and professional intellectuals.
They are busy on college campuses across the country, sounding off with their blame-America-first message.
They are also an undercurrent in the mass media, where they must insinuate what they can say unopposed in academia.
For centuries, some of the most productive people in many societies have also been the most hated.
After the Moriscoes had been expelled en masse from Spain in the 16th century, a Spanish cleric asked: "Who will make our shoes now?"
That was a question that should have been asked before expelling them.
After Indians and Pakistanis were expelled from Uganda in the 1970s, the Ugandan economy collapsed.
People from the Indian subcontinent had created whole industries in East Africa and had been so predominant in the commercial life of the region for so long that the rupee was at one time the prevailing currency there.
Yet they were hated by the very people who benefited from their economic activity.
It has been the same story with the Chinese minority in various countries in Southeast Asia. The mob violence against the Chinese in Indonesia in 1998 was part of a long history of such outbreaks against them in that region, going back for centuries.
Like so many groups, the overseas Chinese were accused of "taking over" whole industries, when in fact they created those industries.
Hatred and mob violence against more productive minorities has been the rule, rather than the exception, for centuries -- whether against the Jews in Eastern Europe, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Germans in Russia, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Chettiars in Burma, the Japanese in Canada or the Asian shopkeepers in our own black ghettoes today.
Whatever the economic benefits that these various groups contributed in these countries, their achievements were a devastating blow to the egos of others.
This was what has been so galling and has provoked such rage.
Seldom are the idle rich as hated as those who started out poor and worked their way up to modest prosperity, because that achievement is a slap across the face of others who have stagnated.
Why then is it so surprising that the most productive country in the world is so hated among those who lag far behind?
Whatever the shortcomings of Americans -- real and imagined -- shortcomings are common to all peoples.
That can hardly be the basis for singling out Americans as objects of a special wrath and venom.
What is new in history is the internal hostility to American society by some of its own citizens who have benefited from its productivity and its generosity.
No one has been more favored and indulged than those in academia and the media -- and no one has acted more like spoiled brats.
Their ego problem is quite different.
These are people convinced of their own superior wisdom and virtue, who are constantly trying to impose that wisdom and virtue on others, whether by media spin, government regulation, classroom propaganda, or moral intimidation.
Their exalted vision of themselves is frustrated by the fact that the vast majority of other Americans reject -- or, worse yet, ignore -- their presumptions of moral leadership.
To some of us, that is called freedom.
But, to the self-anointed, it is enough to produce hostility to the values and traditions of American society.
Some of the 'All Terri, All the Time' petulant Freepers may find that they resemble some of these remarks, I am saddened to say.
My father used to say "never argue with a fool". He sometimes added that it was OK to kick their a**, but never argue with one.
Within a minute of entering the lab, he starts browbeating an openly Bush-supporting coworker of mine over euthanasia in Holland -- I suppose Terri Schiavo brought this on, though her name wasn't mentioned.
Our Dutch liberal tears off into an uninterruptable rant spurred on by nothing in particular, and then utters the phrase 'I wish I could line the whole religious right up against a wall and shoot them!'.
In literally his next breath he told us 'The left and right in America can't have a reasonable discussion anymore'.
We were unable to get more than a few words in edgewise at which point he cut us off by saying 'Don't ever talk politics to me again!' and storming out.
This entire incident was witnessed by another registered FR member.
Quite true. Liberals are just too stupid to argue with, and when you don't respond to their inane name-calling, (Nazis, etc.) they assume they have intellectually defeated you. This smug arrogance of the totally clueless left is what really bugs me.
Since, in the eyes of the enlightened, nuanced left, I, a straight white male Conservative gun owner from "Jesusland", are the lowest form of life on the planet, there is really no point in talking to them at all. They have already pronounced that I, and anyone like me, are beneath them.
Their "Progressive Supremacist" mindset never triggers any cognitive dissonance. They can proclaim hate for guys like me in one sentence, and tout 'diversity' in the next and never see the irony.
I wonder if "She" is Vanna?
This lesson will serve most people well; "Never argue with an idiot, he'll bring you down to his level and then beat you with his experience."
Or,
To put it a different way; Proverbs 26:4 "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him."
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw
Liberals are arguementative to say the least. I listen to talk radio and sometimes listen to the liberal stations, I don't know where they get their information, how they think like they do. A couple of talk show hosts call liberalism a mental disease I first thought that was over the top, but the more I listen to liberals the more I am convinced of the valdity of the statement, just listen to those in congress that are liberal we need go no further.
I gave up arguing with liberals a long time ago after I realized that I don't need anyone to agree with me to be certain that I'm right. It's their problem they can't understand the obvious and it's not my job to lead them by the nose to the truth.