Quote Originally Posted by honedright View Post
Sounds like an embedded sophist's argument against ownership of private property. Anyone who's successfully built a business knows that they did build that.
Quote Originally Posted by honedright View Post
Ok...

Nitpicking
adjective
looking for small or unimportant errors or faults, especially in order to criticize unnecessarily.

Is it just a small or unimportant error in defining free speech as a right, a special privilege given, or as a benefit? No, I don't think it's a small error because it has big implications. Certainly worthy of, and necessary to, correct.

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Quote Originally Posted by honedright View Post
I think everyone should be able to keep the fruits of their labor. After all, what right does anyone else have to other peoples stuff? Oh that's right, "You didn't build that..."
Yes, this is a perfect example of nitpicking. If you don't like what Obama has done or said, then declare something substantive. There is plenty from which to choose. Go ahead and pick one, but please don't stoop to such a low level of pulling phrases out of context in order to build your case. That "you didn't build that..." phrase is a perfect example of lame nitpicking to take advantage of a simple mistake in a single sentence. It was painfully obvious in the CONTEXT of the entire statement that he meant to say "you didn't build that alone." You can ascertain that by the CONTEXT, which again, is here...

If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people,

No, that was NOT an "argument against the ownership of private property."


He was making a painfully simple point that we are at least supposed to all be in this together. We ALL benefit from highways, utilities, scientific research, defense, police, firefighters, the internet, regulated banking, social safety nets, and on and on. No one built their business without benefiting from any of the support provided by the rest of society and its government and that was ALL that he meant by those couple of paragraphs.

Bush made a ridiculous number of malaprops. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." This was one of many many stupid mistakes the man made while speaking, but again, in the context of the speech, we all knew what he meant. No one attacked him for it. It was just another of many stupid mistakes and no one ran with it and said Bush is trying destroy the country and using that phrase out of context to support their claim. That would be absurd.