Quote:
Originally Posted by smc
Many posts ago, Tracy, I suggested that you might be a "master sophist" and encouraged you to look up the word. I don't suspect you did.
In ancient Greece, there was a class of teachers who dealt with philosophy, rhetoric, and politics, and who mastered the "art" of using fallacious but plausible reasoning.
I grow exhausted by your sophistry. You either pretend not to understand how argument works or really do not, but in either case you keep ascribing either explicit or implicit statements or intents to your opponent. Any mention of anything in the argument by your opponent is subjected to the scrutiny of whether it was mentioned previously (this is only relevant if someone actually says you said something and then takes it on; otherwise, in argument one certainly has the right to raise analogous statements, references, etc., so long as it is done fairly). You change the goalposts of the discussion, and you bring in early referents as if they were the most recent subjects of the rhetoric.
I am so exhausted by having to spend time discussing how you argue, rather than only the substance of your points. Were you a student in my university rhetoric class, I would put you on "probation" and get you some tutoring, and that would be irrespective of your positions on any subject. It would be about how to argue.
You can read what I wrote just above and declare victory if you wish, but remember that there are many kinds of victories. If you simply exhaust your opponent with sophistry, as the early Sophists learned, yours may indeed be a Pyrrhic victory for your position in the end.
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LOL keep your red herrings to yourself. I believe the technical term for your type of response is a DODGE. You didn't answer any of my questions.
What does
Quote:
Originally Posted by smc
The vexing social problems are poverty and immigration. The overwhelming majority of undocumented workers who come here from Mexico do so because they are dirt poor and there is so little hope and opportunity in their home country to lift themselves out of poverty. That is why there is so huge a business in individual sending of money from the United States to Mexico: undocumented workers here are supporting their families back home. In many other cases, entire families come here -- for the same reason. This primary motivating factor for crossing our southern border is undeniable
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have to do with closing down Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge to Americans?
Did the actions and policies of the Mexican government have nothing to do with the country's poverty??
And did anyone in this thread accuse Obama of not being born in the US?
I only ask because if you wouldn't want someone to
Quote:
Originally Posted by smc
bring in early referents as if they were the most recent subjects of the rhetoric.
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you probably wouldn't want someone to refer to something that wasn't even said.
Quote:
Originally Posted by randolph
Tracy, you are absolutely right, they are illegal aliens. You are wrong about the taxes.
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Thanks, but Rachel wrote that
Although I doubt income tax and SS is deducted from their pay checks. They don't have SS numbers and companies usually don't report their illegal workers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by randolph
My agricultural company could not have survived without these hardworking guys from Mexico and Guatemala willing to work nine hours a day six days a week for a modest wage.
We cannot stop them from coming up here. What needs to be done is once they have a job, give them a work permit that allows them to legally travel back and forth to Mexico so they can leave their families there where it is much cheaper for them to live.
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I think the work permit is a slippery slop to amnesty or will lead to problems with 3rd class citizens.
Mexicans are hard workers. But if there weren't illegals here the hard work would still get done. It would have to or else we wouldn't be too good to do the work. Our society would fall apart. We would be poor, and then willing to do the hard work. I don't want this to come back and bite us in the butt like slavery did. People used the same arguments about slaves. "They do the work no one else will do".
Well it's time we all do the hard work.