My big issue with language wars is everyone who jumps in pretty much brings their own experience and past projects to the table. It's all anecdotal. It's like asking all your friends what kind of car you should buy.
Even your hardcore gear-head friends will have non-rationally based biases. Audi and BMW makes pretty similar cars in most respects, but you almost always find die-hard Audi fans or die-hard BMW fans who will happily tell you at length why brand A is the best and brand B sucks, when the reality is brands A and B are both pretty good.
My day job is, and has been for 10 years, working with the commercial ATG E-Commerce framework built on J2EE. It's typically implemented by Fortune 500 type companies. There's no equivalent personalization, B2C/B2B commerce, marketing, reporting, etc... framework with the same maturity and proven scalability available in Ruby or Perl or Python or PHP. Does that mean Java is better than Ruby? No, not at all. It means for a certain type of site for a certain type of customer I'd whole heartedly recommend a Java based solution.
Because my day job is spent with Java, I tend to gravitate toward other Java based work in my spare time (I really like the Seam framework from JBoss). I learn things that are applicable back and forth all the time. For me, Java is my preferred language. It doesn't mean it's better or worse than any other language for you or for Tim or whoever. It also doesn't mean it's better or worse for project X, without knowing what project X is.
I haven't seen a language war that wasn't 99% really strong polar opinion based almost exclusively on individual anecdotal experience.
You can have an intelligent language argument, and you can learn something even from an unintelligent one. One of the most telling things is, are there languages that you thought were reasonable that nobody even bothers chipping in to defend. Nobody jumps in to advocate C++ for a quick regex-heavy text file manipulation job, or quick webserver development. Nobody jumps in to advocate Python for mobile applications, or for massively parallel programming. Nobody jumps in to advocate Javascript for offline image processing.
Sure, usually the two sides of a language war talk past each other. You can still learn a lot from the talking points.
If you want to claim that every language is useful and good in its own special way, you may have to accept that COBOL is primarily good at being compatible with old systems based on COBOL, and Pascal is useful mainly for failing to teach computer programming in the 1980s.
Well, it doesn't alone however the concepts that are available in a programming language constrain your thought process. Java/Pascal is much more constraining than something like Oz/Scheme.
I recently visited a webapp thru HN whose developer wrote it in Sleep. http://sleep.dashnine.org/ :)