MOAR HATEFollow

My point was that it's not conversational.

It is vocabulary all 14 year olds should know, or at the worst, be getting to know. Is it words they'd use in speaking to others? No, but it is words they'd be reading in text books, which makes it vocabulary they should know.

I'd just always assumed Pensive had a big thesaurus at his computer desk.

I never said I wasn't cynical. Good for you for not being so much.

And here I thought you were treating me differently because of my stunning looks.

There are like five misunderstandings here that I won't bother to talk about because it's after the fact and beside the point, but I was directing no rancor at you.



I find that they are existent, but rare, and that the caricature is often alluded to more than encountered in life, in purely my experience.

Pensive has not yet learned that for the wordsmith, being concise, not loquacious, is more refined art, unless you are running a bureaucracy. Also, targeting your language toward your audience is part of the jig.

Put better, Brevity is wit.

Edited, Oct 4th 2009 10:17pm by Timelordwho

I like how Pensive posts. :p Not only does he explain his argument in a clear and concise manner, but when he uses words that I don't recognize I am able to understand what they actually mean via context clues alone.

Also, lawlz at stubbs horrible strawman argument.

I likes triple entendres.

Some of us could stand to use more matter and less art.

No, I am a student of several things.

If the NSA is tapping calls going to your aunt for some reason, then yes, it's completely legal as far as FISA goes.

However, if they are tapping your aunts phone specifically so that they can record your conversation with her, then it's illegal. That is one of the four cases in which electronic surveillance requires a FISA court warrant.

I don't have time right at this moment to go link and quote, but here is an approximation of the four cases:

1. Some bizarre case involving ham radio transmissions over a border. Not applicable to phone calls, but it's there.

2. When both end points of an electronic communication are within the US.

3. When the equipment used to tap an electronic communication is located within the US (the "tap site" if you will).

4. When a foreign phone is tapped with the specific intent of capturing surveillance on a US person (someone residing in the US).



Operating a tapping program where you connect into trunk lines and junctures in the Middle East and record every phone call going to or from a list of numbers of people in the Middle East is completely legal. And if someone inside the US calls one of those numbers (or one of those numbers calls someone inside the US), it's still completely legal. Such taps do not require any warrant of any kind.


You are free to insist that this is "not fair", but that's what the actual law says. To claim that the NSA wiretapping program run by the Bush administration was/is illegal unless they get warrants for the taps, you need to prove that it violates one or more of those four cases. No one has *ever* done that. Most don't even address it, playing on the common person's assumption that their phone conversations can never be tapped under any circumstances without a warrant.


What Joph is doing is effectively an argument from ignorance. He's counting on everyone he speaks in front of to be ignorant of the actual law. Because in this case, if you are ignorant of the law, you'll likely think he's right. Um... But he's actually and very obviously wrong.