Indeed. I came here to point out much the same thing: it may be OK for the mainstream media to dumb down their reporting by using the anthropomorphic term "vegetarian" (a word referring to a philosophy) instead of the correct term "herbivore" (or, in this case, "omnivore"), but this is supposed to be news for nerds.

And yes, it's annoying that a sizeable proportion of the comments modded up as insightful on here will essentially be saying "I eat meat. Some people don't. LOL".

Sorry, but nothing you ever write can ever have any credibility after that.

Use Gmail on Firefox with the FireGPG extension installed.

It's neither. It's an exception. The word "except" might be a hint there.

Imagine this. You ask, "did you get everything on the shopping list?". I reply, "yes, except for the apples." Later, you say, "where the hell are the apples? You said you got everything on the list. The "except" part was a qualification, not a denial!"

It looks like you are inadvertently finally answering my question. I asked you what you though "say so" was referring to, and you are claiming here that it means "say all that which Phroggy said". You have it wrong. It actually only refers to the tail end of Phroggy's first paragraph, about the strategy having failed.

I really must have you pegged, because as I wrote that, I strongly suspected that you would respond in this way.

I have identified you as someone with a black-and-white mentality, unable to see grey. For you, "could convey" is incomprehensible. You have to interpret it as "conveys" to make it fit your point. The idea that A could convey B in another context, but not this one, is beyond you. Furthermore, the idea of your opponent politely making a concession to you, granting that something you've said is not entirely stupid because it could make sense in a different context, is not an idea you can grasp. Instead, you interpret it as your opponent letting something slip and then slyly retracting it.

Sadly, I also was pretty sure that you'd go for that low blow. And yet I said it anyway, as a gift to you. It's a sign of how badly you're doing that I can hand you rhetorical flourishes on a plate, without fear.

It's not a matter of need. I've already given an example where a valid statement was made, accompanied by a personal attack. Will you conclude that "such tactics" prove that the person has no argument? Was invading Poland therefore OK in your book?

Woe, eh? The rest of your post is far more woeful. This is reflected in the fact that I devoted a mere two words to correcting the spelling. You, of course, would rather now talk about that, to deflect attention from your faulty arguments.

See http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/07/15/censored-by-money/

That simply never happened except in your head.

It is similar but different. There is about the same similarity as between "don't track dirt onto my carpet" and "take your shoes off". It is possible that they could convey the same message, but they are very different statements in themselves.

I don't have a "point" as such. Remember how this started. You decided to criticise me for allegedly telling someone to shut up. That's your "point". All I've been doing is indicating how wrong you are, with your straw men, etc. I am refuting a point.

Ad hominem

No, shit-for-brains. I can insult you as much as I like, and it affects nothing else. For example, Hitler was a shifty-looking bastard with a nasty moustache. Am I now disqualified from condemning the invasion of Poland?

It's amazing how you manage to latch onto the least relevant part of any given thing. I explain how you (a) put two words together and (b) gave them a certain interpretation; you then defend yourself by arguing that it is reasonable to put the two words together. Can you see what is missing?

Perhaps if I accused you of (a) picking up a gun and (b) shooting a baby in the head with it, you would complain that there's nothing wrong with picking up a gun.

Are you a Wikipedia admin or something? You seem to be one of those people who thinks they sound more convincing if they put a hyperlink to something their opponent has just said.

You have resorted to more and more direct lies. You know full well that I never said "yeah" to the "shut up" question. "Yeah" was my answer to the question of whether people should listen. I specifically said that shutting up was optional, in that very sentence.

It's really amazing how you have latched onto this one "shut up" that you imagine I said. If I'd said it, I wouldn't be saying I hadn't. You, for example, are a lying idiot and should shut the fuck up. See? I don't mind saying it straight out. It's just that I didn't say it where you imagine.

Just in case your problem is more idiocy than malice, I'll explain this for you. I didn't ask you to clarify what you imagined "it's not for you to say so" meant. I asked you to clarify what you imagined "say so" meant. Why? Because I already knew that you had decided to grab the "not" and the "say" and splice them together as "shut up", and then interpret that as some boorish desire to silence people in general. But what, if anything, do you think "say so" refers to? "So" has pronominal value here; it refers back to something previously said. I argued that it was inappropriate for a certain person to say a certain thing. If you re-read that passage, you would see what I was talking about, but then everything you've subsequently said would look ridiculous. To avoid this cognitive dissonance, you can't bring yourself to examine this now. You will have no choice but to throw some sort of tantrum, or claim you can't talk to me.

People setting up straw men rarely think they are doing so. The deform their opponent's argument in their own head first, and then speak.

I could go on, but I'd have to untangle all the pieces of straw. If you want to persist in this, give a clear and concise explanation of what you think I meant by "say so", and I will then point out how inaccurate it is.

There's no need to reiterate your question. I know what you asked. If you'd asked, "does the earth orbit the sun?" I would have responded in the same way, discussing the bizarreness of the question, rather than pointlessly delivering a literal answer.

They have to do with the insane ideology that's behind your earth-and-sun question.

Thanks. I'm slowly managing to tease it out of you. I provoked you into giving a link to a right-wing think-tank. As I said, your views are so loopy that you must have picked them up wholesale from some such source.

The linked article is not even about regulation. It's about the too-big-to-fail doctrine.

This is the second jibe against education. I ignored the first, but it's really starting to look like you're one of those freaks one hears about whose parents pulled them out of school in order to teach them that the world was made by Jehovah in six days. I've been reading a lot about them recently. Scarily ignorant people. It would be best to tone down your attacks on education, lest people think you are one of those.

I also previously mentioned talk radio, as I have heard it is another central source of gun-toting, gummint-hating, black-lynching wackiness. I don't actually know where you personally got it; perhaps you masturbate nightly over Ayn Rand and Ann Coulter. It's just that the odds of any given individual deciding that a crisis involving banks lending when they shouldn't was caused by the existence of recently-removed lending restrictions, are slim. It's more likely to be a lie that has been spread as truth from a central repository. In the same way, the story of Noah was a lie/tale that was put in a book and spread as truth.

If you can understand this concept in relation to Noah, you should be able to understand it in relation to what we are discussing (even if you think there is no lie). If you think that the Bible is true, however, then there is no hope at all.

Yes, I know. I disingenuously pretended that you were asking a serious question rather than just snarkily pushing a straw man at me.

It's absolutely astonishing that anyone could ask such questions. Again, I can barely imagine someone actually coming up with such a thing, in the same way that I can barely imagine someone coming up with the story of Noah and believing it. It's the sort of idea people only receive as part of belonging to a cult. I'm suspecting the cult of Ayn Rand here.

Well, no, obviously not. Which is understandable, given that you're just using the tactic of "I'll repeat back my opponent's disparaging remark, changing a couple of words".

The idea that the existence of regulation is the cause of the current crisis is like saying that AIDS is caused by the existence of doctors. It's just so crazy that you must have obtained it from some repository of craziness — the odds of any given individual coming up with it himself are just way too slim.