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[GlyphGryph]

kingfisher, emotional argument certainly has it's place in whipping up fervor.

But it's simply not convincing. Emotion does not a case make. Your arguments have been nothing but emotion and hyperbole and vague threats of future doom. You've given no concrete answers to clear questions. You've given no reasonable counter to the alternative proposals put forward. You've given no actual justification for the things you want.

Emotional argument is fine, but without those facts, you are doing your own desires a disservice. You are not only failing to support your cause, you are actively harming it. This is the essence of Poes law - someone who is so wrapped up in their own argument that they can't see their rhetoric is actually running counter to the point they are trying to make - that their own words are serving as a scathing indictment.

Australians, at least the ones I've met, are not cowards. Do you think they are? Then why do you think appeals to fear will be an effective rhetorical technique? Most of your emotional arguments have been just that, an appeal to fear. Do you really expect this to be effective?

Do you NOT think Australian's are patriotic? If you do, then why do you seem to find a foreign power violating your sovereign territory and stealing your natural resources to be acceptable? Why do you seem to be so willing to give up the things that your countrymen value, like their ecology, in stubborn worship of a culture of fear? This may not be your actual argument, but this is how it looks to a neutral third party (I'm mostly in this thread for the occasional bout of New Zealand politics).

Your argument is, at best, incredibly ineffective. Even if you are still sure that what you believe is correct, it might be worth examining it and trying to figure out why.

[kingfisher1112]

I might be, and I am sorry, but this really is kind of amusing.
You should come here more often, maybe tomorrow I will feel like bringing up some topic.

Even your apology ( If I can call it that ) has that damn tone to it. I'm reading it in a very nasal voice. Please, I came here for debate. Not " Kingfisher is a stupid poopyface" If I wanted to be berated in front of a lot of people I would shout out various unpopular things in the street.

As opposed to shouting them out in the forum?

"This save the whales bullshit" isn't a particularly civil response to an argument, I'm unsure why you then ask for civility in return...

I am sorry if you did not enjoy that. I will try to refrain from further instances such as this.
And I came here for intellectual debate. I expect more than personal beration.

"There are serious fucking wars brewing"

Where exactly?

I must have stated them a number of times now. Please, go look back through the thread.

I did better than that, i scanned through your personal post history.

And you haven't addressed that even once, as you well know. I'll have to call you out on very obvious trolling.

Just incoherently yelling "Indonesia" isn't the same as an argument that Australia is in Dire Peril.

Trolling? Apparently having a different political opinion is trolling now. If you're just going to yell " Trolling" when I have a particular political opinion that is strange and not seen often, well, then why are you still replying to a "troll"?
 As I said before. Israel. China/Taiwan. Indonesia and East Timor. China/Japan. North Korea. Various dictatorships toppling. While certain ones are small, they have the potential of starting a war. Small things start wars. Big things start wars. Some take long times to boil over. These are some. I'm sure to have missed some.

[Max White]

Emotional speech has a place in persuasive speaking Y'know.

And I came here for intellectual debate.

These two concepts are mutually exclusive.

[Reelya]

Trolling? Apparently having a different political opinion is trolling now. If you're just going to yell " Trolling" when I have a particular political opinion that is strange and not seen often, well, then why are you still replying to a "troll"?

It's nothing to do with your opinions. It's making false claims that you already answered specific questions, when you did not. You claimed "f-ing serious wars are brewing" and I asked you to clarify, you claimed i must have missed you stating it clearly several times in the thread. I checked, and you never did. so you were lying, regardless of your political views.

Refusing to clarify a point you yourself brought up, by lying that you "already addressed it" is very obvious troll behavior.

[Frumple]

"There are serious fucking wars brewing"

Where exactly?

I must have stated them a number of times now. Please, go look back through the thread.

All the ones you brought up were pretty comfortably refuted, unfortunately. The NK thing is a overall non-issue and the more local stuff are all non-starters. If you want to look to other conflict areas, like the middle east, Africa, or South America, those are all either doing more or less business as usual (ME, Africa) or improving (SA). Invasion just isn't particularly worth it these days, especially of the larger powers, and by and large the chance of any genuinely major military conflict happening any time soon (and by soon, I mean in our lifetime, barring major ecological shifts or somethin.) is pretty darn small. It's just not really how things work anymore.

You can get away with invading Iraq or installing a puppet dictatorship in South America or whatever, or jumping on your neighboring banana republic, but trying to jack something like AUS just isn't going to happen. Too many people with too many guns, up to and including the nation being invaded, stand to lose too much to just sit back and let it happen. Large scale invasions are a non-thing at this point -- the advance of the military machine and the political state of the world has rendered them obsolete and unprofitable. War between and against large powers (and AUS is large enough to count, really.), to the extent that it exists, is fought through proxies and trade nowadays. Not ground wars and direct conflict, where it's pretty much impossible to come out ahead.

Anything big enough to shake things up to the point ground war or direct military conflict with the larger nations becomes an actual possibility is going to destabilize everything, to an extent you'd have plenty of time to prepare and react. The chance of blitzkrieg or something similar happening nowadays is functionally zero.

[kingfisher1112]

Emotional speech has a place in persuasive speaking Y'know.

And I came here for intellectual debate.

These two concepts are mutually exclusive.

No they are not. Emotional speaking is a way of appealing to human emotion in persuasive writing, and then you use facts and evidence to back them up. It is to appeal to humans, as humans are not robots. While facts and evidence are great and strong for your side, emotional argument is like an icing on top. It drives it further into the people's minds.

Trolling? Apparently having a different political opinion is trolling now. If you're just going to yell " Trolling" when I have a particular political opinion that is strange and not seen often, well, then why are you still replying to a "troll"?

It's nothing to do with your opinions. It's making false claims that you already answered specific questions, when you did not.

You claimed "f-ing serious wars are brewing" and I asked you to clarify, you claimed i must have missed you stating it clearly several times in the thread. I checked, and you never did. so you were lying, regardless of your political views.

Now, it looks like you're just acting dumb for the sake of it.

Ahem, excuse me. You seem to not read the rest of my post a lot of the time. Please, read my full post.

That's it. I'm just too tired to post. I'll come back later. Likely quite a few hours. Then I will go get all the posts where I mention serious wars. And answering questions wrongly isn't trolling.

[Max White]

No they are not. Emotional speaking is a way of appealing to human emotion in persuasive writing, and then you use facts and evidence to back them up. It is to appeal to humans, as humans are not robots. While facts and evidence are great and strong for your side, emotional argument is like an icing on top. It drives it further into the people's minds.

Here is one of the most basic, fundamental misunderstandings of intellectual debate. The goal isn't to change anybodies mine. The goal is to try and determine what is objectively true. To do this, both sides must approach the debate with the idea that they could be wrong.
For example, if you say it would be good to increase military personal by 25%, we don't say 'No that is wrong!', instead we say 'why, and how will we afford it?', because we aren't trying to convince you that you are wrong, we are trying to remove all doubt from our minds that you are right. When you are unable or unwilling to answer these questions, we come to the conclusion that your proposal is wrong.

As such, emotive speaking serves no reason.

[Descan]

You can have professional actual engineers to build infrastructure cheaper than trained military personnel, so that fails on the "efficiency argument".

So combat engineers who would otherwise do nothing being sent to do stuff is less effective then engineers here building infrastructure here and are under the command of private companies who have no interests in small, poor nations?

Or, hey, here's an idea? How about you train the combat engineers to BE specialist engineers, and HIRE specialist engineers on the government payroll to go do the third-world building schemes?

Then, you have more competent engineers for the private industry, AND you get your third-world stuff built by true professionals!

Yeah, there is nothing menacing Australia. If in the future someone build an army up, well, you'll have time to build yours up too.

Except that our government won't because of people saying " Oh, they won't hurt us!"
And again, the defence funding also goes into funding for Cadets, a very good youth organisation. Cutting back on that funding would cut back on youth funding, which is never a good thing.

Then instead of building a larger army for something that -might- happen, put the money towards intelligence operations to find out what IS happening.


Okay, before this gets out of hand: All your arguments are "The military does all this OTHER stuff that's good! That's why we need it, even though we don't actually need to fight anyone now."

To that, I say: "Why not fund programs to DO that other stuff, then? Cadet-style summer camps, third-world infrastructure and investment aid, intelligence operations. You don't NEED to be able to invade a country to be able to do the OTHER stuff the military does."

Edit: And Sheb said basically this with his first post on this topic. :3

[kingfisher1112]

Well, I've taken a look at what I've said. Honestly? I got too caught up In what I was saying. A serious rethink is needed. Goodbye for now.

[Descan]

I just want to say, as an outsider? One of the first things I think of is the natural environment of Australia. That other stuff you mentioned? Half of it I barely know anything about, the other half is not all that particular to Australia (Everyone but America is in football. And the American South has a lot of barbeque, especially Texas.)

Also, what do you have against gay marriage? I never understood why people are against it, really.

[Reelya]

Also, what do you have against gay marriage? I never understood why people are against it, really.

I thought it was gun control he didn't like, and he expressed no opinion on gay marriage. At least that was how I read it.

[Descan]

Ah, I misread. I thought he was for gun regulation, and against gay marriage.

[Blargityblarg]

I just want to say, as an outsider? One of the first things I think of is the natural environment of Australia. That other stuff you mentioned? Half of it I barely know anything about, the other half is not all that particular to Australia (Everyone but America is in football. And the American South has a lot of barbeque, especially Texas.)

Also, what do you have against gay marriage? I never understood why people are against it, really.

To be fair, we have our own football (from watching people play, you'd think they'd gotten a bit more intimate with the roos than you'd like), and our barbecues aren't anything like  the Carolinian kind; it's not a dish so much as an event. Most of what he's brought up as Australian culture, though, is pretty much exclusively White Australian culture.

[Osmosis Jones]

So, can we go back to discussing actual political happenings, rather than silly hypotheticals?

_{I'm still sad no one commented on my link that two labor pollies (one minister and one senator) were US informants. : ' (}

[Jimmy]

So, can we go back to discussing actual political happenings, rather than silly hypotheticals?

_{I'm still sad no one commented on my link that two labor pollies (one minister and one senator) were US informants. : ' (}

Yeah, yet another piece of proof of the USA interfering in our politics. Thank god for WikiLeaks, it's easy to see now why the US government got their panties in a twist over that one.

So yeah, on that subject, aparently Assange is shooting for an Australian political office or something? Anyone been following this story?