How one can not be aware that this is the reality of America politics since, at least, the Clintons can only indicate that one is simply not paying attention.
As I said, above. I’m in. What topic/rules of debate do you want to do? What issue do you imagine is so difficult for us liberals to understand about your point of view?
I have to agree with Atamasama on this. Facts are stubborn things. There are certain events that actually happened. We can have opinions about the causes, significance, or consequences, but the facts remain. If your opinions don’t agree with the facts, then they aren’t helpful. When people point this out, those aren’t just “zingers”. We’re trying to understand the world as it really is, not the way we wish it to be.
“You are entitled to your own set of opinions. You are not entitled to your own set of facts.”
Harlan Ellison (paraphrased, from memory)
Nope,
“Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks.”
Ellison is hardly the originator of the concept.
Bernard Baruch said the earliest version in 1948 (“Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”), and James Schlesinger said slightly different versions of “You are entitled to your own views, but you are not entitled to your own facts" in 1975 and 1976. Daniel Moynihan is often given credit for the last version, but he said it in 1983, and gave credit to Alan Greenspan.
Can’t we be content to disagree on who first said that? 
If I pit two MMA fighters against one another, and require one to down a pint of bourbon the night before the fight, certainly if the bourbon drinker wins, that means he’s the better fighter. But if he loses, then nothing is really proven. It might be he’s an inferior fighter, but it also may mean that drinking bourbon before a fight is bad.
Same deal with politics, just swap defending Reaganomics with fighting an MMA match with hangover. There’s no value in it unless you think all positions are a priori equal, or you just really like fighting.
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A kumquat?
Yeah, but for Og’s sake, don’t tell him that. (Well, you can’t, he’s dead.) You know the old trope about how there are only twelve stories in all of human literature? Harlan could make a case that he was the original writer of seven of them.
He’s been this shitty for years and years. Expecting him to suddenly stop being a shitstain is futile.
Don’t waste your time.
I would say that we’re entitled to our opinions, but we are NOT entitled to put them out in the public sphere and expect to be shielded from any critisism about them. Particularly when the opinions are based on things that have no basis in evidence based reality.
It’s like the folks who babble about “free speech”. What they really want is "No Consequence" free speech.
In thinking about this more, there are folks who believe that there is a set of empirical facts, and this should form the basis of discussion. That there are natural, measurable, constant things that exist in the universe, like the nature of the atom. These people tend to gravitate to more scientific or research based fields.
There are others who believe that reality is created by discussion, and that whoever “wins” an argument has therefore created the facts, These people tend to get into fields like business or law.
It’s really hard for folks in these two worlds to understand each other, because each understands reality from a radically different viewpoint.
That’s known as a ‘category error’, and it happens when you evaluate someone based on your own perceptions and experience and logic, while ignoring that the other person may not be motivated by the same things, have a different view of reality, or have such a different life experience that they draw radically different conclusions from the same set of facts. Or in extremis like today, don’t even agree on what the facts are.
A classic example is trying to understand a dictator’s behavior. “He would never invade Ukraine, because evidence A, B, and C says that would be a ridicuous move.” In the meantime, the dictator has pressures and goals and threats not visible outside of his world, and may be thinking something like, “If I don’t invade now, dumb as it is, that asshole Grigory is going to finally raise enough hardliner support to depose me.”
That’s why I said that to make reasonable decisions about this stuff you have to have empathy for the other side. Empathy doesn’t mean agreement, it’s more about putting yourself in their head, trying to understand their motivations from their point of view.
It should be obvious that a farmer in a border state is going to see illigeal immigration very differently than a lawyer in DC. Or that a person living in an apartment in a big city with no social safety net would see the world very differently than someone in a suburb from a good family and relatives all around to lean on.
If you decide the ‘other’s’ choices are stupid or evil based on your own experience and values abd the opinions of your own tribe, you may be making a category error. That’s why bubbles are bad and everyone should strive to honestly understand other people rather than compiling a list of arguments, zingers and gotchas they can throw out as armor any time someone disagrees with them.
No, not at all. The proper analogy is that you make one fighter drink bourbon, then you have a rematch and make the other fighter do the same. Now you get to find out who can fight better after drinking bourbon, or whether bourbon has an effect on fighting ability.
As for the debate, the point isn’t to see who can defend Reaganomics, it’s to see if you understand the other side’s point of view well enough to defend it. And the idea of then having to switch sides and defend the other side eliminates the variable of which side is actually ‘better’.
If the issue is truly one-sided, I would expect the outcome of two equally-matched debaters to be that they both lose when arguing the ‘bad’ side, and at least one wins when defending the ‘good’ side.
But if someone beats you with your own arguments when you try to debate their side, and then beats you again when you try to defend ‘your’ side, you may have a problem.
How far down this rabbit hole do you go down? Serial killers and child molestors are views that I strongly disagree with, should I be looking from their point of view?
For less contentious subjects, how about Flat Earthers or Creationists? Do you need to understand their point of view in order to know that they are wrong?
Now, given the skills I have seen on both sides, I’d actually say that if you had JohnT defend Reaganomics while you tried to attack it, he’d probably win that debate, and then have to take a long, long shower to get the stink off his soul, if ever he could. But that’s just because he’s far more skilled at debate than you are. He brings nukes to a pillow fight, you bring a pillow fight to a debate.
If you were the one claiming that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, and JohnT took the Flat Earth side of the debate seriously, he’d probably still win.
But face it, sometimes the sides aren’t equal. The last time I participated in your activity was back in a college public speaking class where we were doing debates, and our team was assigned to be for requiring drug tests for welfare recipients. Fun thing, the other 3 on my team were for this, as was the majority of the other team. I was about the only person who was against it.
So, we start doing research, and my team is getting frustrated that everything they dig up keeps telling them that drug testing for welfare is a failed policy, there are no facts to support the position that we are supposed to take. So, they more or less make stuff up, or at least leave out context, and change the debate from being about facts to being about feelings.
We won, which pissed me off, as a significant number of the judges were predisposed towards this requirement, and it really seemed as though our opponents hearts weren’t really in it. They read off some facts and figures that showed that the policy was a failure (some of which I emailed to them), and pretty much left it at that, while we pounded the table and made the emotional plea about our hard earned tax dollars going to buy drugs.
No, it wouldn’t. How do we agree on how to move forward if we can’t agree where we’ve been?
So, what you call “factoids and zingers” are facts and arguments. The way that such a debate is supposed to be run. And why do you presuppose that the other side has not been contemplated, that it hasn’t been analyzed in relation to facts, and has been found coming up wanting, every single time?
Yes, I agree. Facts are facts. But people often disagree on what the facts are. Especially political partisans who are predisposed to disbelieving things that shed some kind of uncomfortable truth on their tribe. And as people retreat into media bubbles that conform to their preconceived worldview and we stop consuming shared news, we are diverging more and more on what the facts actually are.
We are increasingly living in a world full of disinformation from all sides, partisan media that spins and reports things from a very slanted point of view or literally ignores facts that are uncomfortable for their readers, censorship, malign state actors interfering in the information stream, etc.
We SHOULD be able to agree on the facts. The reality is, we often don’t.
A good example is the thread on the shop teacher wearing enormous fake breasts and long flowing hair to shop class. This was a fact. They did it. There is video of the person using a chop saw in a shop class, with children milling around. There were reports from multiple news media about it. It is not reasonable to assume it was some kind of staged show or a deepfake or other fakery.
But go look at how hard some people worked in that thread to deny that this had happened. The media was sketchy, the pictures probably doctored, it was a setup, a conservative fakeout, this never happened. If it did, there’s something wrong about the framing of it. It simply can’t be what it plainly appears to be.
Except it was. To be fair, most people came around to believing it in the end, but only because this is the SDMB and there were people successfully defending the truth of it. If this had been an Occupy Democrats message board, I can guess the consensus would have been that this whole thing was some form of fakery to be ignored. Also see: The Hunter Biden Laptop. Or, the reaction of Trump supporters to any number of news stories of Trump’s misbehavior.
I thought the point was to have it. Hamlet has agreed, I think multiple times. Are you gonna do it, or ignore his offer in favor of debating the debate idea?
I’m open to suggestions. What issues do you think we on the right don’t understand about your point of view?
From my side, I’d say there is a lot the left doesn’t get about free market economics, but we’ve already started an economics thread. Another area is energy policy, but you kind of have to be technically knowledgeable about the grid and energy tech. Or maybe that’s just my own bias showing, and you think you could argue that one.
I would have thrown in military spending and the need for a robust military, but I don’t think there’s as much disagreement on that as there used to be - especially after Ukraine.
Or, we could narrow it down and debate very specific proposals, such as safe consumption sites (‘injection facilities for drug addics’), or solutions to homelessness. We could debate the usefulness of global multilateral treaties or organizations like the UN.
But I’m open to your ideas.
You should have waited ten more seconds before posting that. At least you didn’t call me a fraidy cat.