A serious question for Sam Stone on Factual Errors

I mean, it’d been two days since his offer, and you’d posted three times since his offer, but if you wanna blame me for an itchy trigger-finger, nifty.

Yeah, wait until Rudy finally let’s us know what he found on the hard drive.

Seriously? Hunter’s laptop? The only thing you’ve failed to do is use the term “Democrat Party.” Yes, Hunter Biden had a laptop. I have one too. Do you have anything more than that to offer?

Fine, as long it goes both ways.

I do try to understand their points of view. I’m an agnostic, but I try to accept that pro-life activists are often people of faith, and are acting according to their sincere beliefs. I disagree, but can do it respectfully.

Personally, I don’t think that U.S. law should be based on the dogma of a particular religion. I don’t see pro-life activists putting any effort into understanding my point of view.

All of them.

But you didn’t ask me.

Yes, of course. What do you think FBI profilers do? If you want to stop serial killers or serial killing in general, it really helps to try to understand why they do it. Not just in terms of coming up with clever arguments for how wrong and depraved serial killing is, but to really get what drives someone to do it.

Absolutely! Flat Earthers are fascinating. They maintain a world view impervious to evidence. The study of what makes them tick could shed light on all kinds of human behaviour. Why would you NOT want to understand them? Better to just call them stupid and ignore that there are many, many people who somehow came to this conclusion?

And if you really understood flat earthers, you might actually have a chance to come up with an argument they will accept. Because clearly “You are stupid.” doesn’t work with them. Maybe they aren’t stupid, and they are driven to believe it through some other force you don’t understand but might be useful to know, if for no other reason than that it will better able you to change a flat earther’s mind.

Seriously? Now here’s a category error of my own: I can’t believe someone would think that engaging in a debate where you have to accept a propopition other than your own and defend it to be some kind of soul-destroying exercise. It’s a freaking debate. IF entertaining a different point of view and defending it is soul-crushing, perhaps it speaks to either uncertainty around your beliefs or a kind of totalitarianism of mind that refuses to even entertain uncomfortable thoughts.

I answered your other points in my last messages.

The thing is:

Some of us think that there is a physical, factual answer to the question of “was there proof of a crime committed by Hunter Biden contained on the laptop in question?”

Physical, actual evidence.

Others think that if they win the argument (maybe by repeating it enough), or get enough people to believe that there was proof on the laptop, then this means that they have created the reality that there really was proof on the laptop.

Physical evidence has nothing to do with it. Reality does not come first. In their world, reality is created by winning the argument.

It is really, really hard for many of us to understand this way of thinking. Lawyers get it.

I’m asking you now. Which ones in particular? Or better yet, which would be a very egregious example of where the right simply doesn’t understand the positions of the left? As opposed to understanding but disagreeing.

Or, you can do the same for the left. I don’t care.

Really? You can’t think of any proposition where it would be gross to defend it? Any proposition at all? Not even if Godwin helps you out?

The point about the Hunter Laptop is that in 2020 the left was sure that it was a Russian disinformation thing, and not real. It was faked, no one would drop off a laptop and not retrieve it, there was a suggestion that the store owner was a Republican plant, why would it go to Rudy Guliani if it wasn’t disinformation, yada yada.

You could get kicked off of social media for even suggesting that it was real. 40 ex-spooks signed a document saying that it was almost certainly Russian disinformation.

This was a huge gulf in what the right and left believed were the facts around the case. Not just interpretation of the damage that could result from the content, but a fundamental disagreement on whether or not it was even Hunter’s laptop. When Tony Bobulinski came out and verified many of the E-mails and other content, the response wasn’t to consider his evidence, but to attack him personally.

It took until well after the election before the left begrudgingly allowed that yes, perhaps it’s his laptop, and yes, the content we’ve seen appears to be real. But they still maintain there’s nothing there worth investigating, as Hunter isn’t Joe. Never mind the E-mails that seem to connect Joe to Hunter’s work, or Joe Biden being caught in numerous lies about his knowledge of what Hunter’s business was involved in, that he had never met Hunter’s partners or clients, etc.

This is stuff that, had it been Donald Trump Jr;s laptop would have led to endless calls from the left for criminal charges, and I think the potential connections to dad would have been obvious to all. No one would hand-wave away ‘the big guy’ reference, especially when a witness was willing to testify under oath that it was Trump.

And frankly, there would be people on the right doing the opposite.

Category error,
For the fallacy, see fallacy of composition and fallacy of division. A category mistake, or category error is a semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-mistakes/

Category mistakes are sentences such as ‘The number two is blue’, ‘The theory of relativity is eating breakfast’, or ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’.

All of them.

But since you mentioned Reaganomics earlier in this thread, I’ll start with that.

Or that Reagan got the Iranian hostages released.

Or fiscal responsibility by Republicans.

It doesn’t have to work with them. It has to work with the people they are at risk of infecting with their brand of insanity. Treating absolute nonsense with respect just gives us Birtherism, perhaps the stupidest scandal I’ve ever been subject to, repeated for YEARS after the man’s actual birth certificate was posted publicly before the 2008 election.

It’s been noted before… you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into in the first place.

Really. If i were writing a novel with a Nazi character, I would want to understand what made Nazis tick so I could represent the character accurately. Wouldn’t you? If you want to avoid electing genocidal maniacs, isn’t it a good idea to try to get into the head of a genoocidal maniac so you can understand what makes them tick and how to spot them before they commit genocide? Just screaming, "Genocide BAD!’ might get you virtue-signalling points, but it doesn’t help anyone’s understanding.

There are a lot of novels out there that explore the minds of serial killers, racists, etc. American Psycho, for example. Do you think that book destroyed the author’s soul?

I can’t imagine thinking that there are some ideas so awful that they must never be mentioned, thought of, analyzed, etc. Debating them is a good way to find holes in your understanding.

Now, I think there are plenty of topics that are unwise for public debate in our current society - not because it’s soul-crushing, but because we have gotten to the point where the mere uttering of the forbidden thoughts will get you into trouble, even if you do so for the purpose of understanding what you consider to be evil.

Who said anything about respect? You don’t have to respect something to understand it. Trying to put yourself in the mind of a serial killer to understand why they do it is not ‘respecting serial killers’. For example, a profiler does it so they can catch serial killers and lock them up.

Then wouldn’t it be interesting to find out why they believe it? If not logic, what? The process of understanding them might just lead to understanding of the human condition in other ways.

What an interesting change of scenario, moving from “defend a proposition in a debate” to “have a character in a novel.” I wonder why you’d move the goalpost like that?

Actually, I don’t really wonder, because it doesn’t matter. I’m moving it back. You can’t think of any proposition where it would be gross to defend it in a debate?

I didn’t think I moved snything. The process is the same.

You seem to be thinking of this kind of debate as being an attempt to change minds. I’m thinking of it as an academic exercise to find holes in your or my thinking.

You know, there are lots of things where, when you understand them better you can hate them even more. Sometimes you think someone says something or does something out of ignorance or tribal loyalty or whatever, but if you really dig in and find out what makes them tick… it’s much worse. And that’s good to know as well.

So, you not only wouldn’t find it gross to stand up and offer a lengthy defense of NAMBLA, chattel slavery, or Auschwitz, but you “can’t believe” someone would find it a “soul-destroying excercise” to do so?

This is just total bullshit. The “left” position was that the laptop thing was a bullshit story. And it is a bullshit story. It always was. Maybe it was part Russian disinfo, part right-wing conspiracy nonsense, part random internet bullshit, but it was always complete bullshit. There was never an actual story. The possibility of Hunter Biden having a laptop, that maybe had porn on it (who cares), and maybe had vague discussions of business, and maybe had pictures of him doing drugs (which was known for years), was not a story. Bobulinski’s bullshit was not a story (nothing was actually verified!).

This has been explained to you over and over again, and at this point I think you’re just lying about it. Maybe you can offer another explanation, but that will probably be a lie too. I just wonder why this particular lie is so important to you, when it’s so obviously bullshit. You’re even continuing to spread the conspiracy bullshit about the business stuff – Bobulinski offered nothing; there were no relevant Biden lies about business; absolutely nothing. Just rumors and innuendo.

You’re still lying about it. Just shameful. You really should be ashamed of yourself for spreading these lies after so long.

You can’t understand it without having a lot of discussion about it. These ideas don’t deserve discussion, they deserve to be smothered. The only person who needs to discuss it is the believer’s licensed therapist. Not me, not you, not some talking head on Fox, or a guy on Twitter, or a podcaster.

We need to go back to when crazies needed to mimeograph their nonsense and mail it out by hand.

There’s a big difference between Auschwitz and any of the other things listed here. No, I would not debate those in public, because the public considers them off limits. More to the point, within the context of the SDMB, which is what I have been talking about, no one holds those opinions so they won’t come up for debate. You are intentionally seeking the worst edge cases you can think of to make your point.

That said, would you read Mein Kampf? I would. I haven’t, but I will get around to it some day. Not because I find it ‘interesting’, but because I find everything about Hitler nauseating and it would be useful to see how a person got to such a place. I have read the Communist Manifesto and parts of Das Kapital, even though I think the ideas within them have caused more human suffering than any other philosophy in modern times, including Naziism.

But maybe I’m different than many of you in this. I have spent 20 years on a board full of people who hate me and attack me constantly, listening to many ideas I find abhorrent. I have never pitted someone over their beliefs, and I accept that others believe different things than I do, and it doesn’t enrage me. I feel no need to protect myself from wrongthink. I would never censor someone’s speech, no matter how vile, unless it crossed a line into threats or actionable slander.

On the other hand, some of you can’t tolerate the small handful of conservatives that might be here, and attack them incessantly. So yeah, maybe we just think differently.