When Israel re-arrested Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank town of Dura, the detainees faced familiar treatment.

They were blindfolded, handcuffed, insulted and kept in inhumane conditions. More unusual was that each man had a number written on his forehead.

Osama Shaheen, who was released in August after 10 months of administrative detention, told Middle East Eye that soldiers brutally stormed his house, smashing his furniture.

“The soldiers turned us from names into numbers, and every detainee had a number that they used to provoke him during his arrest and call him by number instead of name. To them, we are just numbers.”

  • @Dasus
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    02 months ago

    A couple cherry picked examples are still just a couple examples. In order to have a random pool you need a much larger sample lol.

    Still moving the goalposts. You just literally can not admit to being wrong. Must be hard, living like that. And it makes for an absolutely disgusting personality.

    I didn’t cherrypick anything. None of the examples that organically come up from that site which has millions of clips through searching for the terms are cherrypicked. It’s literally the opposite of cherrypicking. :D Unlike your “oh but there’s another guy also trying to discredit this article criticising Israel and that has upvotes”, so it must mean that my asinine interpretation was correct".

    People like you asserting that “everyone is interpreting it in this way I just made up that doesn’t conform to colloqual English, linguistic descriptivism or journalistic standards” doesn’t mean that it’s happening. I can find a bunch of Flat Earthers. Does that make the Earth flat? You too know you’ve been disingenuous in your rhetoric, but you just won’t be able to admit it.

    You said:

    ###Everyone in the comments are assuming the literal and first dictionary definition of branding by physical mutilation.

    Which was wrong. And now you’re desperately using the view of descriptivists while defending your argument about the article allegedly being written by someone who’s a linguistic prescriptivist. (Have you still even bothered to read up on those to the point that you’d finally understand what the terms mean?)

    • @TheFonz
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      02 months ago

      Removed by mod

      • @Dasus
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        02 months ago

        So the randomly picked samples from millions of clips that all support my point about how “brand” is used — even in the context of a scene that is even set in the wild west… is just a coincidence?

        No goalposts were moved. We’re still on the same asinine topic. Can you specify which post was moved? Be specific.

        So you stand behind this comment:

        Everyone in the comments are assuming the literal and first dictionary definition of branding by physical mutilation.

        ?

        Why do you feel the need to specify “first dictionary definition” there? Couldn’t have anything to do with you not understanding that definitions in dictionaries don’t go by order of “most used”, and someone having noted to you before that comment that “printed mark” is also a definition of “brand”?

        Clearly you’re not correct there. Not everyone is saying that. You’re demanding that the headline is to be interpreted literally, and only in one single way that you’ve chosen (actually cherry-picked from a list of definitions that are being actively used, as I have demonstrated several times from databases which have millions and millions of entries). Yet you also insist that this literal interpretation can’t be use for the comment in which you demand that the headline is interpreted purely prescriptively.

        You see people claiming that “everyone is interpreting it in this way” doesn’t mean that it’s true that they are. You’ve failed to show anyone interpreting it like that. You’ve shown that people upvoted a comment asserting that is happening. That’s like saying you’ve proved the Earth to be Flat because you can point to a comment with upvotes claiming it’s Flat.

        See you being too lazy and not spending five minutes to learn what “prescriptive” means that you’ve written these comments all day not realising how ironic it is to anyone with a basic understanding of philology. :D I’ve repeated myself about a dozen times, yet you just won’t believe you can be wrong, so you haven’t even bothered to skim the articles I’ve linked, meaning you continue this ironic garbage. Which I thank you for, because I’m having a rather empty evening otherwise, so repeating this to you until you get it is something very pleasant to do. :)

          • @Dasus
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            2 months ago

            So you stand behind this comment:

            Everyone in the comments are assuming the literal and first dictionary definition of branding by physical mutilation.

            ?

            You said it and you meant it and you’re now definitely not moving any goalposts in regards to it?

            All you had to do was to actually read the link I linked to you in the first comment I made, and you would’ve got this, and you could’ve avoided this tantrum you’re having. It’s a weird hill to die on, man.

            • @TheFonz
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              12 months ago

              Removed by mod

              • @Dasus
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                12 months ago

                So you said a thing you can’t back up and now you’re ignoring it while still obsessively replying, because you can’t let it go.

                It’s a really weird hill to die on, man.

                You said “Everyone in the comments are assuming the literal and first dictionary definition of branding by physical mutilation.”

                You can’t now walk back that very specific statement, and you can’t defend it either, but you’re not a big enough person to admit that you said something that wasn’t right. You know that I know that you know that I know that you didn’t read the articles about linguistic prescriptivism and descriptivism, because if you had even skimmed them, you’d have understood the issue, and you definitely wouldn’t have defended your own statement about demanding ‘the headline is prescriptive’ as descriptive.

                It’s okay. You have to make these mistakes to learn from them.

                • @TheFonz
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                  2 months ago

                  Removed by mod

                  • @Dasus
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                    2 months ago

                    I’ve addressed your “but other people have asserted the same bullshit I have, so the bullshit must be true!” quite a few times now.

                    See you’re walking back this statement you made. Now you’re trying to say “no, I didn’t say that everyone is literally using that definition, I only said that some others have pointed out the ambiguity”?

                    “To imply a good majority”

                    Oh… so… people use figures of speech when they use language, instead of meaning the literal meaning of the words they’re using? Oh geez. I wonder if there’s like any discipline which studies how language is used.

                    I’ve not at any point claimed that there aren’t people who may have perceived it as a literal burning iron. I’m noting that there isn’t a single one in this thread in which you claim that EVERYONE is using “the LITERAL and FIRST dictionary definition”. Literally everyone should be interpreting it as literal branding. There’s not a single comment saying so. Definitely not everyone or even a “good majority”. Only yours saying that every other comment is doing that, despite everyone being able to read the other comments, like mine, which are pointing out that that’s not how language or journalistic headlines work.

                    It’s not biased, but you’re rather adamant it is, yet can’t even stand behind your words, but also can’t admit that were wrong or that you can’t stand behind them.

                    Just like I said, you’re now trying to defend a statement where you assert that the headline is purely prescriptive, as a statement that was purely descriptive. You could avoid all this by reading wikipedia for a few minutes, but instead you keep coming back here to humiliate yourself more and more. It’s hilarious.