A serious question for Sam Stone on Factual Errors

The BBQ Pit
561

If you guys want me to apologize for thinking the Durham report might cough up more than it did, I’ll make you a deal: Let’s go in chronological order. First, all of you who thought that Trump won in 2016 because of Russian interference can apologize, because that turned out to be bullshit. The evidence for that came from John Podesta’s “Alliance for Defending Democracy”'s ‘Hamilton 68’ dashboard of 600 supposed Russian bot accounts. It turns out that Twitter employees who were asked to look into the allegations found nothing to substantiate them. It was a psy-op. Or as Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety at the time who had to check those accounts said, “[Hamilton 68] falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots. I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” Except they didn’t.

Next, those who believed the Steele Dossier was legitimate intel on Russian connnections to Trump can get in line, along with the people who said that Mueller’s investigation would result in Trump going to jail.

When those apologies are done, we can next get all the people to line up who said the Hunter Biden Laptop was Russian disinformation. And the ones who pitted anyone who disagreed can smoke a turd while they wait.

I could go on. I’ll bet everyone in this thread has made some bad calls and mistakes (anyone here who was on ‘team transitory’ regarding inflation?), but most of you are on the ‘same side’, and thus those mistakes don’t catch your attention, or they do but you just know the intentions were right but it was an honest error… But if someone you disagree with does the same, well, here comes the pit! It’s just tiring.

Or, I have a better idea. Maybe we could all accept that we have different ideas and read different things and live in our own little bubbles, and be tolerant of people who don’t think the same or share the same ‘facts’.

Maybe intstead of running to the pit to tear down someone who ‘lies’ about something that’s really a political opinion, you could reflect on how great it is to have the SDMB where smart people can disagree with each other respectfully and help us all see a little bit outside our own little worlds. Save the pittings for the anti-social assholes who come to the board to stir up shit, not just people whose political ideas are ‘wrong’.

562

Do you know how time works?

Russian interference did help Trump win in 2016.

And an organization founded in 2017, right or wrong, has sweet fuck all to do with that rock solid fact. Look at the dates of the emails from your own fucking cite.

563

The Hamilton 68 was cooked up to back up the claims of Russian interference. What other evidence was there?

564

How far should we lower our expectations to entice conservatives to stay here? Sam says that we are chasing them away by questioning them on their “facts” and methods of operation, but I am of the opinion that anyone should be welcome here as long as they meet the very minimal requirements. If some conservatives cannot do that, then they are not being “chased away” because they are conservative, but because they are unrepentant assholes. Should we excuse unrepentant assholery just because our quota of conservatives are running low?

565

Is that a trick question? Because he clearly doesn’t.

566

We get it. Despite previous promises, you have no intention of apologizing or admitting that you are wrong unless everyone else does it first…and even then, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

567

…lower them as low as you like. Or raise them. :: shrugs ::

Just don’t be surprised when a conservative poster posts something conservative.

I mean: I don’t really care about what Sam says?

568

And yet, you are posting in this thread.

569

…congratulations. Well spotted.

570

Seriously?

Mueller Report

Vol I

Section II RUSSIAN “ACTIVE MEASURES” SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN
Large scale operation run out of the Internet Research Agency.

Section III. RUSSIAN HACKING AND DUMPING OPERATIONS
Examples include hugely influential in keeping the drip, drip, drip of email stories on the front page. Also used to offset the negative hit from the Access Hollywood tape
.
Section IV. RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT LINKS TO AND CONTACTS WITH THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN
Over 100 pages of collusion.

It’s pretty shocking that you’re so unfamiliar with it.

A 2018 website, even if it’s wrong about everything, is not evidence one way or the other about the Russian operation to influence the 2016 election. How would that even work?

571

it’s called “deliberate ignorance”.

572

If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t feel the need to attack back.

And if you actually have a moral objection to this “bullying”, you wouldn’t say the same things yourself.

I’ve avoided attacking you (something I’ve been trying to do for everyone, even in the Pit). It hasn’t really led to you listening to me. You’ve replied back a couple times, but only when you thought you could one-up me. You still never admit your mistakes.

You are very, very frustrating in the Musk thread. I go there to read about what he has done or what other bad stuff has happened, and exactly why that is so stupid. I don’t like having to put up with the arguments about how he’s really a genius and that his seemingly stupid actions are secretly genius.

So I keep hoping you’ll see that your arguments along those lines are at best pointless and at worst wrong.

573

Hold the phone a minute, Ernestine. Given that over fifty former senior professional intel experts went on record saying at the time it was likely that it was “a classic case of Russian disinformation” you can hardly blame some of the people on this board for buying into this story, including @DrDeth who posted the story in the first place. These were not guys who lived in their mothers’ basements, they were retired spooks.

(Even given the “proven” existence of the laptop and some of these emails…I still have a hard time believing anybody just takes a laptop to a repair shop and forgets about it. I would do that with a car before a computer.)

So, as for your “lining up” the people who did understandably feel that the laptop was a product of Russian counterintelligence personnel, let me hold my hand in front of your face, back of my hand facing you, and line up my first three fingers…

…and then you can read between the lines.

574

Sure, but a key difference is that you make your bad calls and mistakes with such a sneering dismissive tone for anybody who isn’t convinced by them. And usually on issues debatable enough to make your arrogance thoroughly unjustified.

Consider, for example, your repeated attempts to handwave away the January 6 insurrection, which gradually petered out as more and more evidence emerged that your gratuitously dismissive downplaying of it was fundamentally wrong.

And so on. The issue, Sam, is not that you sometimes make an honest mistake about facts: the issue is that you’re constantly and aggressively trying to spin the facts to support your own desired narrative, even when the evidence is extremely thin.

And then when fuller evidence makes your narrative untenable, and your melodramatic assertions end up just looking stupid, you backpedal and shift the goalposts and change the focus to specific smaller-scale claims. But I was right that not all the rioters were Proud Boys! But I was right that a lot of them were just disorganized angry people! And you hope that by throwing up this smokescreen of nitpicking specific details, you can distract attention away from the fact that your fundamental narrative was just wrong.

You spent a bunch of posts in the winter and spring of '21 trying to sell the story that the Jan. 6 attacks were no more serious or orchestrated or potentially damaging than a random spontaneous angry riot at a BLM march, which turned out to be bullshit. Just as you spent a bunch of posts in the Durham thread trying to sell the story that Durham was about to uncover devastating revelations about serious Democratic misconduct.

It wasn’t just you “thinking the Durham report might cough up more than it did”. It was you persistently insinuating, exaggerating, hyping up every possible indication you could find that might suggest all kinds of sinister malfeasance. And when those possible indications likewise turned out to be bullshit, you deflated your story back down to the neutral-sounding “thinking the report might cough up more than it did”.

That’s the thing that’s so annoying about you and factual errors, Sam. You are constantly running up rhetorical bills for full-on malicious partisan propaganda, and then demanding only to be charged for occasional inadvertent mistakes. And you try to excuse your irresponsible propaganda efforts as mere ideological diversity that we’re all supposed to be grateful to you for supplying.

Making up as much inadequately supported anti-liberal gossip as you can think of, until you’re reluctantly forced to acknowledge its eventual contradiction by emerging facts, is not helping anybody see anything of any constructive value. The thing that’s actually great about having the SDMB is that we’re able to have an online community that shares the goal of fighting ignorance. What you’re doing with your hyped-up speculative anti-liberal wish-fulfillment narratives is amplifying ignorance, not fighting it.

575

The existence of Hunter’s laptop was never the issue, but rather whether there was a real story there.

There wasn’t. There still isn’t. That Hunter had a laptop is not a story. Unverifiable emails are not a story. Personal pictures are not a story (Hunters personal challenges were already widely known). There was never anything more than rumor and innuendo designed to manipulate the gullible.

576

This is a lie that has been debunked over and over and over again to you. And yet here you are repeating it again. Will you apologize for that?

It did have legitimate unverified intel on Russian connections to Trump. As has been pointed out to you over and over and over again. Will you apologize for that?

And the reason is that Bill Barr and the entire Congressional Republican Party successfully prevented Trump from facing any consequences for the well-evidenced crimes he committed. So congratulations for reminding us once again that the political side you support are profoundly corrupt. Will you apologize for that?

As already pointed out, the existence of the laptop was never the issue; it was the claims of the contents that were rightly considered dubious. Yet here you are, pretending that the mere existence of the laptop somehow proves you right and us wrong. Will you apologize for repeating this falsehood yet again?

These aren’t “bad calls and mistakes”. These are all things that have been discussed ad nauseum with you and thoroughly debunked over and over and over again. Yet here you are, pretending that these claims have any merit. When will you apologize for them?

You are making claims that are demonstrably false. This is not about ‘facts’, it’s about actual facts without the scare quotes.

Current evidence suggests you’re in the first group. This is not about political ideas; this is about things that have actually happened or not happened. Reality is not just a matter of opinion.

577

Also: the bipartisan, GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee report that validated all the Mueller Report findings and expanded on them.

And the six people connected to the Trump campaign convicted of felony perjury specifically for lying under oath to hide their meetings with Russia.

And quite a lot of other stuff too, but frankly if the above aren’t enough, the rest won’t tip the scales.

578

It is absolutely mind blowing that he apparently thinks the only evidence of Russian Interference in the 2016 election was a website that was briefly popular in around 2018 that everyone has pretty much forgotten about. It’s such a bizarre attempt to to revise history.

579

It takes some real chutzpah to be a 0.021 hitter but defend yourself by saying not even Ted Williams got a hit every at-bat. Much less try to dismiss all their own strikeouts as infrequent and not all that important in the grand scheme.

580

I don’t think I’m confused–anyone else? I mean, sure, you’re mocking me, but that’s weak tea, given the source.

Anyway, I wanna focus on the “you’re better than this” line. I’ve had it directed at me by a few posters over the years: Shagnasty, and Liberal, and that idiot who kept bragging about being in the triple-nine club or whatever it was called.

What it meant, every time, was this: the poster was someone who overrelied on weak cites and shoddy reasoning, who appreciated that I am tighter with my thinking and more careful with my cites, but who didn’t appreciate when I directed my impatience at them. “You’re better than this” meant “I don’t enjoy being the target of your frustration.” It meant, “Please stop making me the ox that’s getting gored.”

So, no: I’m not better than this, and neither are you. I’m treating you exactly how I treat other people who bring a third-rate game to the debate, and you just don’t like it when you’re the one treated that way. If you’ll start being better than this–if you’ll at least start checking the dates on your cites for god’s sake–then you’ll find that I treat you better.