Unless…Shodan, you don’t consider YOURSELF above the fray, do you? I mean, what about you? Are YOU a “fair and impartial adjudicator of truth”, in your mind?
No, I’m going to have to call bullshit on this - the casual slide from “the Usual Suspects” to a general comment about the board overall. Is it the case that there is a relatively small number of posters who aggressively and irrationally challenge conservatives, or is there an overall board policy or practice or convention or whatever to challenge conservatives, rationally or otherwise?
If you have a clear idea of who comprises the group you call “Usual Suspects” (and I’ve no idea if I’m included in such a group or not), why not just ignore them and converse with those who disagree articulately? If you choose to keep engaging your “Usual Suspects” (especially after you’ve concluded that they do not and cannot pose an intelligent argument), that doesn’t make you a conservative hero - it makes you a masochist or an idiot.
Let me get this straight. Are we actually arguing about the proposition: “X people tend to be biased in favor of their own opinions”?
Can I make an attempt at defining X? How about “most”?
And if you accept that this is true, why is it even remarkable that it might be true for some subset of X?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=15654854#post15654854
I think its hard to argue that SDMB is a level playing field.
This is in fact the reason why so many of the more extreme conservatives get chased away. Their positions and arguments suck and don’t why everyone is laughing at them. Our more extreme liberal posters seem to under5stand why everyone laughs at them.
To be fair, he delivers pretty good snarky one liners. At least it shows some creativity.
That’s certainly true, in cases where “the precise details of some controversial case” are of interest and focus in their own right. Where they’re being brought up only as an illustration of something that everyone agrees to anyway, then no.
I mean, you might get a “I agree in general but …” post or two, but not this level of intensity.
People wo jog are joggers. The correct jogging simile would be “the topic was jogs, not jogger”.
You interpreted Shodan’s words as being a differentiation between different types of posters, when it was between different types of posts.
Sounds a lot like Just Asking Questions.
Even if your take is correct, something I do not grant, his follow-up references to “the Usual Suspects” demonstrates I was not incorrect. At best, you have a hairsplitting semantic quibble.
Oh I’m sure Shodan does differentiate between some posters and other posters. He is not a fool. But that didn’t happen to be the point he was making at that time.
I take the argument to be not whether individuals tend to be biased toward their own opinions, but whether we are cognizant of our own biases. (Fwiw, I suspect that most would agree that such bias exists, while believing deep down to be less susceptible than average. That is: she’d demur from claiming to be an impartial adjudicator of truth — but nevertheless behave as if she were.)
It’s more than just that.
Because the overwhelming dominance of one viewpoint carries a weight of its own. Shouldn’t necessarily carry it, but psychologically it’s there. So there’s some value in pointing out every once in a while that it’s compromised by bias.
I read your post 4 times and have no idea what you were saying, sorry 
Sure, that is clearly true. But to me, that’s pretty much an unavoidable fact of human nature. Gather together several hundred vocal and opinionated people, with 90% or so on one side of a big cultural/philosophical divide, and set them to arguing about issues of the day, and unless you’ve gone WAY WAY WAY out of your way to find nothing but absolute paragons of non-cliquey objective rational calm logic, or have set up some extremely rigid formal rules for how arguments can be presented or what have you, you’re going to end up in a situation where the minority side gets more mockery and insults (called for or not) than the majority side.
In fact, I’d hazard the guess that on the scale of minority-opinions-are-treated-with-intelligent-response-rather-than-mockery, the SDMB is pretty far towards the good, when compared with most internet forums which have a similarly unbalanced membership. (Insert your own “unbalanced” jokes here).
So to me, there’s a difference between you saying “on the SDMB, conservative viewpoints are treated more roughly than liberal viewpoints… which, while regrettable, and not something we should be complacent about or accepting of, is a nearly inevitable result of large groups of opinionated strangers interacting on the internet” and you saying “on the SDMB, conservative viewpoints are treated more roughly than liberal viewpoints… and that proves that SDMB liberals as a group are unusually bad/hypocritical/mean/small-minded/dumb/smug/cliquey/arrogant/smelly”. The former I’d agree with, and I agree that it’s a problem, because it makes it very hard to have reasoned dialog about anything. But I always feel like you’re implying the latter, even if you’re not really being clear precisely what you’re saying.
What you said was that it’s not a contradiction - and is in fact fairly normal - to argue vociferously that even though “your side” isn’t perfect as a general rule, they are in the right in the particular instance at hand.
What I’m saying is that this is true in cases where the primary focus is the instance at hand. IOW someone on “your side” is being accused of driving faster than the speeding limit, for example, and you happen to think in this case he is innocent. Even if you admit that in general people on “your side” sometimes drive faster than the speeding limit, that is not the primary focus at this time - what’s relevant is the specific incident, and you feel this instance is not one of those examples.
But suppose the crux of the issue was not this particular incident, but rather the general principle of whether people on your side sometimes exceed the speeding limit,and the specific incident is only being cited as a proof of it. And you agree that they people on your side do speed, but happen to think this case is not one of them. Would you - and a bunch of other people - spend a lot of energy disputing the details of this particular case. This is what I think is unlikely. This type of thing might attract a few offhand comments, but is not likely to be vigorously disputed.
FWIW, I agree that the former formulation is more accurate.
But as above, I think that - despite it being nearly inevitable, and obvious to thinking peole - there’s some value of pointing out even the former every once in a while, as long as it doesn’t descend into constant whining about it.
I’m still confused as to how your analogy applies. I believe that the specific example we’re talking about is a situation in which Bricker claimed that there was an equivalence between two threads, and that the differing responses to them demonstrated liberal hypocrisy.
So one level of response is to point out that the two threads are, in fact, not particularly equivalent. Many people are doing so, and I see no reason why they should not, as I believe the point they are making is accurate. Bricker’s claim was in fact (imho) unfounded on a pretty superficial level.
At the same time, I personally (and of course there’s no guarantee that any/all liberals agree with me) think there’s a deeper point to make, which is several related points:
(1) It is in fact almost certain that the reaction that SDMB threads receive will differ at least some based purely on politics and personalities (ie, identical threads started by a well known and respected liberal poster, vs an unknown liberal poster, vs Der Trihs, vs an unknown conservative poster, vs John Mace, vs Shodan; would all get different reactions)
(2) As far as I know, few people if any have ever claimed otherwise
(3) And this doesn’t prove anything meaningful about SDMB liberals as a whole, as it’s pretty much an inevitable feature of human interaction
I guess I’m not sure which part (if any) of all of that you disagree with…
Because Bricker’s entire point in comparing the two threads was solely to make the more general point that his posts are treated differently because he makes them. If you agree with his general point that his posts are in fact treated differently, then the fact that you feel this particular example fails to prove it is of no significance, and hence not worth making a big argument about.
The fact that so many people felt this was worth making a big argument about shows that they felt it was of significance, and this is IMO because they either deny or at least prefer to obfuscate the general point that Bricker’s posts are treated differently.
[We may be at an impasse here.]
I pretty much agree with all this. (In 2) I would add the word “explicitly”.
I’m a bit surprised to see you you hedging on whether any/all liberals agree with you, as you earlier indicated that it was completely obvious and unremarkable.
Well, let’s say there are indeed thirty of forty regular contributors to Elections and political threads in GD in the Pit who won’t give a conservative poster a fair shake. It’s when this morphs into “the mainstream” where a conservative on this board an never get a fair shake that I have to object.
I get that conservatives have been subject to years of propaganda on this point (i.e. their views would be accepted by everyone, but for a determined conspiracy to not accept them), though, so it doesn’t upset me too much.
There’s an old saying in Tennessee. I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, fool me once: shame on, shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.
But are you able to give an example of an overwhelming dominance of one viewpoint?
Which “viewpoint” specifically?