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Old 01-04-2001, 06:30 AM   #1
Memnoch
Ironworks Moderator
 

Join Date: February 28, 2001
Location: Boston/Sydney
Posts: 11,771
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Well, the board is really slow tonight (the ONLY night in the last couple of weeks I have gotten home early from work) so I will break my rule against flaming. Now who to shred? Lemme see, who would be on now? how about...Armisael!!

My complaint about Armisael
What I offer here is an involved yet detached look at Armisael's conjectures. Perhaps time, further study, and more reflection will either modify or enrich the analysis offered here, but Armisael should take all the bull-pucky he's been throwing at us and fertilize his garden with it. What follows is a series of remarks addressed to the readers of this letter and to Armisael himself. It is quite common today to hear people express themselves as follows: "In a country like ours where corporatism, antagonism, and communism run rampant, we need laws to help enforce behavior that ought done out of common sense, decency, and tolerance." This brings us to the dark underside of his sentiments, the side that's known to censor by caricature and preempt discussion by stereotype. We can say that none of what he says carries any weight, and he can claim the opposite, and it won't make one bit of difference. In case you hadn't noticed, Armisael's arguments would be a lot more effective if they were at least accurate or intelligent, not just a load of bull for the sake of being controversial.

Armisael offers two principal reasons as to why his excuses are a breath of fresh air amid our modern culture's toxic cloud of chaos. He argues that (1) pernicious boneheads are more deserving of honor than our nation's war heroes, and (2) it is better that a hundred thousand people should perish than that he should be even slightly inconvenienced. These arguments are invalid for the following reasons: First, his detestable insane anecdotes are in full flower, and their poisonous petals of narcissism are blooming all around us.

He is not as contemptible or lackadaisical as you might think. He's more so. Armisael's tracts are based on a denial of reality, on the substitution of a deliberately falsified picture of the world in place of reality. And this dishonesty, this refusal to admit the truth, will have some very serious consequences for all of us before the year is over. My argument gets a little complicated here. Whereas Armisael claims that his beliefs (as I would certainly not call them logically reasoned arguments) are Right with a capital R, I myself claim that I have one itsy-bitsy problem with his artifices. Namely, they deny citizens the ability to become informed about the destruction that he is capable of. And that's saying nothing about how he has two imperatives. The first is to alter laws, language, and customs in the service of regulating social relations. The second imperative is to jump on everything that is written, said, or even implied and label it as either villainous or ethically bankrupt. In a nutshell, due to circumstances that I have encountered in my research, I find that I must provide an antidote to contemporary manifestations of slatternly militarism.

Before you guys think I'm high, click here for an absolute screamer.

Armisael, I await your response with baited breath...
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