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.

Yes, because they know. If they act unethically, regulation will be necessary.

Did a gun-carrying radio talkshow host tell you that? It's not an idea anyone could have spontaneously formed.

Essentially, yeah. Except the shutting-up part is optional. And after the listening there should ideally be an action phase.

That would be fine as a rhetorical question, but you actually don't know, do you?

Similarly, I can imagine a kid who sits in the back of the class sending text messages and chewing gum saying, "Why would I go out of my way to try to figure out what this nutjob teacher is saying? If my stoner friends tell me that learning is for losers, and I have no idea why you are trying to make me literate and numerate, then your teaching has completely failed, and you need to rethink it."

It's always good to re-evaluate strategies, but it's not for you to say so. It is yours to listen for once.

Ah, I considered the possibility that the summary might be talking about a different deal from the one I have, but when I saw that the Youtube video also said 2am, I took that as confirmation. Anyway, the controversy over the encouragement of illegal download applies to both deals.

I see that the ad for the 8pm–8am deal mentions 5GB of peak traffic and says that if you go over it, you will be throttled both off and on peak. In my case, I did not respond to an ad. AAPT phoned me up and orally offered me 20GB on peak, with unlimited downloads off peak. We did an audio contract right there on the phone. I never agreed to my offpeak broadband being cut off if I went over my onpeak limit.

8pm to 8am? I wish!

I am currently on AAPT's unlimited-offpeak plan. The article summary is wrong. The offpeak period in fact begins at 2am. You can actually see this in the fine print at the bottom of the linked Youtube video.

In passing, I'll moan about something related. Last month, we went over our onpeak limit of 20GB. Our broadband was cut off, and we had to content ourselves with dial-up speed for the rest of the month. We sighed, and thought, "oh well, at least the broadband will only be cut off from 8am till 2am. We're paying for unlimited traffic from 2am till 8am, so we'll still have that."

I had, of course, forgotten that it was AAPT we were dealing with -- that cesspit of incompetence, greed and malice. The wankers cut us off overnight too.

Since then, I have resolved to be careful during the day, and to download the Internet every frickin' night from 2am till 8am.