Hitchens on single standards

[kelley at pulpculture.org]

At 12:11 PM 5/4/02 -0400, ravi wrote:
>kelley at pulpculture.org wrote:
> >> Dennis Perrin wrote:
> >> >> What else would you call those who felt that the al-Qaeda/Taliban
> >> >> gangsters
> >> >> should have been left alone? Appeasers? Cowards? Moral idiots?
> >> >> Certainly not
> >> >> "progressives."
> >>
> >> <...>
> >> if the
> >> choice is exclusively between carrying out war on the people of
> >> afghanistan and doing nothing, for i prefer the latter.
> >>
> >>         --ravi
> >
> > ahhh, but that wasn't the question was it? that wasn't the choice that
> > Dennis outlined. Look up at the quoted text from Dennis. Is that
> > question there?
> >
>
>
>quite true, but i was responding to jks, not directly to dp. since jks
>did not include anything more than the above from dennis, and since i
>trust jks' logical completeness, i explicitly stated that *if* the
>choice is between the two positions, *then* i fall on the side of the
>malignant fucks.

irrelevant. in a defensive posture designed to turn your opponents into 
your own version of a "malignant fuck" (without typing the phrase) you 
responded to your ally in the debate and changed the terms of the 
discussion to the either/or YOU prefer, that one that makes YOU look best, 
and makes YOUR answer easy. It is not the more nuanced discussion that 
might have been had. And, this is precisely the reason why this debate gets 
fucked so quickly.

kelley