Morgeruat, where'd you hear that? Sounds urban-legend-ish to me.

Nouns ending in 'is' become 'es' in plural form.

Thus Analysis (singular) = Analyses (plural).

I know about analyses. Do you propose I type something absurd like "analyzationes"? Irregardless of what you decide, I'm not going to degrade this thread by debating linguistics with you.

((And yes, "irregardless" is a non-word that I despise but use it for ironic purposes))

I propose you would write your original sentence like this:

"When your arguments boil down to picking apart a single statement or asanine analyses about semantics, it seems as so much angry flailing in the face of logic."

Semantics holds a massive place in the 'gay marriage' debate because the definition of marriage is what the debate is all about.

If you're going to nitpick, Djinn, at least do the complete job. [img]tongue.gif[/img]
It's asinine.

[ 08-06-2004, 04:29 PM: Message edited by: Melusine ]

Yep. But, enough people in this country prefer to-may-toes to to-mah-toes that the gay rights movement is really buggering itself by making a big deal about the term "marriage."

If they just would be smart enough to go for "all the substantive rights of marriage, no matter what you bigots want to call it" then they would have the support of the vast majority, including both presidential candidates. And, it is my personal experience, from knowing a LOT of gay people, that by and large they just care about the substantive rights (if they care at all -- some don't give a rat's ass about marriage in the least).

But, it's the agenda of the extreme gay rights groups -- Lambda, B-GLAD, Rainbow Coalition -- that have hijacked the whole gay population and misrepresented the majority of what gays believe and want in order to pursue their more radical political agenda. It's currently backfiring on them.

A lot of people get pissed when you give someone an inch and they try to take a mile. For the majority of small-brained conservatives, civil unions are fine, but gay marriages aren't. That's a long way for small-brained conservatives to have come in the last decade or two. Unfortunately, that paradigmatical change in attitude in this country cannot be capitalized upon because the small group of small-brained gay rights groups insist that "that isn't enough."

Anyway, [img]graemlins/rant.gif[/img] over -- for now.

[ 08-06-2004, 04:41 PM: Message edited by: Timber Loftis ]

I copied and pasted that! [img]tongue.gif[/img] :D

[ 08-06-2004, 05:27 PM: Message edited by: Djinn Raffo ]

Timber, I agree.

Again, it's a very narrow view of the world presented. Environmentalism is not the exclusive domain of the west, or Europe or in fact agrarian societies.

Aboriginal and Amerindian societies had what amounts to environmental policies in their SUBSISTENCE economies. Respect for the land, care for the cycle, for the balance, living in harmony with their environment rather than changing it unrecognisably.

Certainly these cultures clung to the environment long before the west began threatening it. Their cultures were built around such concepts.

It's not a semantic issue. Blanketly labelling discrimination, intolerance or fundamentalism as being evil is ludicrous. The content or direction of those judgements is subjectively good or evil, not the processes themselves.