Previous to your thread starting spree in Great Debates, there was always the monthly drive-by guest poster/new poster debates on legalised marijuana, how god really exists, and other standards. But besides those there was a variety of interesting topics raised and then debated by intelligent individuals.
And while the monthly standards haven’t ceased, for all intents and purposes the interesting debates have ended and the general level of debate lowered since you began. And the reason for that is that having the top five headlines of Washington Post, or whatever else you happened to read while sitting on your butt at the library, posted as topics to “Go! Debate!” have swamped out the forum so that items which don’t prod daily righteous outrage as the Iraq War end up not having a chance to garner interest from enough posters to stay at the top of the forum. And similarly, the daily-righteous-outrage nature-towards-Bush nature of these has brought in more people who simply want to bitch, rather than debate.
Most Greate Debate threads these days read a lot like Pit threads from a year ago or however along ago that was. That’s a sad thing so far as I am concerned, and I would imagine that you would agree assuming I’m right.
My recommendation–or even humble request–would be that you hold yourself to a quota. Try and start one thread per a week (preferably with a stated reason for why you think the subject is interesting and what all things of interest there might be to be debated. I.e. what prompted you to post it.)
I’d like for there to be something in Great Debates besides the SDMB equivalent of a Headline News YouTube. And moreso I’d like to see the return of reasoned debate.
-Sage Rat
PS: I’d be fairly willing to bet that Guantanamo isn’t the premiere location for torture in Cuba. Harping on Bush while supporting the Cuban government has to be one of the greater cases of selective vision I know. So aside from the above points, I suspect that the age old law of “Post Less. Read More.” will be productive in other avenues. Try reading other people’s thoughts. It’s a lot more useful in the long than trying to finagle it so there’s no opposing ideas floating around. That doesn’t actually work to convert people to your side. It just makes everyone else go elsewhere.
I must admit I agree. I spent almost two hours last week putting together an OP on the philosophy of understanding. I examined it from the point of view of ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and epistemology. I took a position and defended it. The thread sank into oblivion shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile, a cotemporary thread by BrainGlutton was a copy-paste from some news rag with a comment like, “Please discuss.” Since it was a hot topic, it took off like crazy. I mean, goddamn it.
First off, Liberal, you know and I know that the reason your thread sank wasn’t because BrainGlutton starts too many threads. You know it, I know it, the American People know it.
On the other hand, BrainGlutton is turning into the Harry Turtledove of Great Debates.
I think it’s a shame that the mods are allowing him to turn GD into his blog of current events. This MB has gone downhill because of it, IMO. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and (as I said the other recent Pit Thread) he won’t change unless he’s forced to do so. Maybe we should just boycott his threads until something changes…?
Liberal: I read your OP, and I couldn’t understand it. It seemed superficial and trivial, but it obviously was deeply philosophical to you. I just assumed I was missing something.
I rather like BrainGlutton. He has a wide range of interests and this is reflected in his choice of GD debate topics. His threads have sparked debate on such on such diverse affairs as the Guy Fawes plot, censorship in the Chavez regime, and the Nicaraguan Presidential elections. One might be tempted to think of these threads as mere anomalies in an otherwise featureless morass of MENA related threads, but a quick perusal of his posting history reveals that they are not isolated examples.
It is true that the majority of BrainGlutton’s OP’s focus on the troubles in the Middle East, and it is also true that the format of his OP’s is rather predictable. However, I disagree that either the content or abundance of his minimalistic OP’s alone is enough to justify the accusation that his participation has lowered the level of debate in GD. His threads generally foster robust argumentation from both sides and if it transpires that some of his threads degenerate into partisan squabbling, well, this is the Dope after all. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember (and I was reading the boards long before I joined).
I appreciate how frustrating that could be. However, I think it’s unfair to imply that the lacklustre response to your thread was due, either in whole or in part, to the preponderence of threads created by BrainGlutton. There are currently 50 threads on the first page of GD. He has only started 8 of them. That’s a lot, certainly, but not enough to significantly dampen the variety of debate topics here. Even if he were to double the threads he created daily, that would still leave plenty of room for other topics. Moreover, your thread (if this is indeed the thread to which you are referring) did receive 42 responses. That’s not bad. A great many other GD topics receive far less.
So yeah, in summary, BrainGlutton’s cool. I agree that it would be nice if he put more of his own thoughts into his OP’s, but I don’t consider his overreliance on newspaper articles particularly detrimental to either his threads or the quality of GD debate in general.
I sort of have mixed feelings concerning BrainGlutton’s unstoppable posting onslaught. He hits upon some topics that I feel are worthy of Great Debate quite often. But it’s much more likely that he is just going to copy and paste something from the Washington Post or speculate about some conspiracy theory he’s found in a left-leaning blog. He’s created some GD threads that I’ve enjoyed posting in and that were worthy of debate.
However, I also think he’s a prime culprit in making Great Debates essentially the “current events” forum. I remember hearing something about making a forum for current events or something like that, but remember it being shot down. I do think some of the truly great GD threads have been ones that are not about current political events, but about more broad-based concepts and ideas. I remember Sentient Meat or someone like that did a series of threads based on the questions asked at the Political Compass website. While I posted my distaste for the structure of those questions over at that website, I think as a foundation for debate separated (typically) from whatever is on the front page of the Washington Post or CNN.com they were excellent.
I think the problem with making GD a purely “current political events commentary” forum is, in our lives we’re basically inundated with that. I enjoy debating current events, but I hear people doing that at work, in restaurants, in bars, I hear paid pundits doing it on TV, and if that’s not enough there’s more op-eds than I could hope to read in a month coming out every day. It would be nice if GD at least had a lesser volume of current events debates and a higher one of more generalized ideas.
I partly agree with John Mace. I think half of BG’s threads would be more appropriate on a blog. Since there is a lot of cut-n-paste, another option would be to save up some material in support of a given point and then use it in a single post when needed.
elucidator, you can stop holding his dick anytime you want to. Any time there’s even a whiff of criticism of BrainGlutton you’re sure enough right there. What are you, his press secretary?
The problem isn’t necessarily that he’s even bringing up bad issues to debate. It’s mostly the general context taken as a whole. He’s essentially using Great Debates as a blog, and if that doesn’t lessen the forum, I don’t know what does.
Except of course, most bloggers actually put their own take on current events. All BrainGlutton does is post and say “what do you think?” Arguably many of his OP’s aren’t even a debate in themselves, just a news article and a general question about how people feel.
I think there should be some requirement that if you post a thread to great debates you put out your own position in said debate in the very first post. We as individual posters are not supposed to function like a debate moderator, I think it’s expected we participate in the debates that we start, not doing so is bad form.
The reason BG doesn’t get called to task is most of the news articles he asks for commentary on are articles which embarrass George Bush or the Republican party. Never mind some of his GD threads are barely distinguishable from ones he has already started, or that most of them begin not with him posting any of his own opinions; as long as the posts serve the “cause” of bashing the Bush Administration or the GOP they will be generally accepted by 'luci.
If I actually got the impression that BrainGlutton was seriously interested in a genuine debate concerning all the topics he posts to GD, I would give him a pass. To demonstrate that he was seriously interested in said debates, I’d have to see him open his threads WITH an argument, not a one line commentary or worse, a general question about what WE think with no input from himself. Then, while I would think his posting a bit excessive, I’d be 100% okay with it, if someone was generally willing to put in the time and effort to genuinely debate a dozen or so new topics a week I’d be a bit astonished they had so much time to spend on these forums–but I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
As it is, though, his threads don’t seem like him attempting to engage in debate, they just seem like him trying to assault Bush and the GOP by endless repetition. By hitting on those things with a huge quantity of assaults instead of a few quality ones.
I don’t care about that. They can hammer on George W. Bush all they want to. What I find telling is that this is the second thread on this topic in the past week, on top of which a number of us have felt it necessary to point out how ridiculous it’s getting, and yet there’s our boy elucidator acting the lapdog and pretending that this trend of dissatisfaction doesn’t exist, challenging us to pistols at dawn to defend the honor of a thread spammer.
Oh, I agree. And I didn’t mean to leave the impression that it was his fault. It was just that I spent so much time and thought, and he spent zero. It’s jealousy, really. Not blame.
Well, plenty of BrainGlutton’s “The President of Kyrgyzstan just outlawed wearing backwards baseball caps! What do you think?” threads sink like a stone too.
He was warned recently not to turn the Pit into his blog, but he starts 3 or 4 times as many threads in GD. I don’t get it. Seems like the rule should be more strict in GD than in the Pit.
Here’s the thing-- part of “not being a jerk” is not doing things that, if everyone did them would make this place shitty. Now, what if everyone decided to start 5 threads a day from cut-and-paste articles on current events in GD? Hell, what if just 5 people did that?
