Here's a blast from the past.
Remember Torgerson? Last September, while kicking him into his hat over his reaction to my quantitative analysis of the then-current state of the Iraq war, entitled “Putting Civilian Deaths in Perspective,” I made the following comment:
Torgerson, if you can show me that the CURRENT rate of death by starvation among the Iraqi five-and-under set works out to 32,000 kids a year, I will quite publicly eat my hat. Otherwise, whether you like it or not, I judge that you are implicitly agitating in favor of murdering children.
This thread was about as dead as they get until last week, when one James Miller posted this nugget:
Jason, hate to say it, but you got beat. You actually got emotionally involved enough to tell a reasonable debater that he wants to murder children. Wow. No matter what you say now you will be assumed to be irrational. Since you have a strong opinion based on what you admit is sparse data I have to assume you are anyway. You might as well just take down your site. Better luck next war/conflict/ego pumping scheme.
<sigh>
Okay, Jim, let's take this one step at a time. Try to keep up.
I'm one of those pedants who insists on using words in accordance with their actual definitions. The habit drives my liberal friends crazy, but I find that it often streamlines communication. In this case the operative term is implicitly, root implicit.
According to dictionary.com, implicit means
- Implied or understood though not directly expressed: an implicit agreement not to raise the touchy subject.
- Contained in the nature of something though not readily apparent: “Frustration is implicit in any attempt to express the deepest self” (Patricia Hampl).
- Having no doubts or reservations; unquestioning: implicit trust.
I used the word according to definition #2: although Torgerson surely has no overt desire to murder children, the death of innocents is a natural consequence of the position he espouses. In other words, whether he wants children to be murdered or not, if we act on his positions, they will die. Since Torgerson was agitating in favor of his position, and since a natural consequence of this position's implementation is the murder of children, I judged Torgerson to be implicitly agitating in favor of murdering children.
I don't think Torgerson is an evil man. I just think he's a dangerous fool.