Do you see a difference between responses to Shodan on political issues and responses to Bricker?
Here:
Boo hoo, friend Bricker.
You aren’t a generic conservative offering a genuine position based in logical thinking and rational thought. You’re a guy who is knowingly scrambling to find a rationale for supporting voter suppression.
You’ve flopped on your face for months now trying to defend it and failed utterly each time. You have laughed at the idea of poor people not being able to vote. You scoff at people in poverty having to spend days of additional effort so that they can exercise the franchise.
I call you a cumpig, because you’re not a good person. And are in fact, an ungulate that roots and snuffs for hobo semen.
OK, so that should establish the facts to satisfaction. Now, back to the issue …
An attack on a man that supports voter suppression of minorities and the poor isn’t the same thing as supporting blanket attacks on conservatives.
Wouldn’t you agree?
Also here:
Ok, now we are getting somewhere.
I completely agree Lobohan is behaving poorly in that exchange and it’s possible Lobohan does that frequently.
And as I look at that exchange and think about it, I don’t think I typically see the few poster’s I am aware of that are self-proclaimed conservatives behaving that way.
So I’ll give you one point for that.
But the next question is whether this is a pattern of most of the board or just a smaller number of poorly behaving individuals. Which do you think it is?
Unquestionably the latter.
I’m going to go with Option 3.
There is a pervasive hostility that affects most liberal posters to one degree or another. Few are as egregious as that example. Few are completely calm and rational. Most are somewhere in between.
Regardless, the overall cumulative impact is the same.
In my defense, in the thread I posted that in, Bricker has for literally months supported and defended voter suppression efforts against minorities. He has actually typed out cackling when it was looking like the ID laws would work and there would be electoral advantage for the Republicans.
He also outright lied about several poster’s positions saying that they supported electoral fraud if it helped Democrats.
In short, his behavior in that thread had more than warranted calling him a silly billy.
That said, do I behave poorly, perhaps. But it’s not in a vacuum.
Would you mind terribly expressing that to your fellow SDMB conservatives, in hopes of encouraging them to stop using terms like “mainstream” and “liberal hive-mind” and such to describe an imaginary collective effort to suppress them?
If it’s only a small number of people, let’s revisit the post from the OP:
This post heavily implies that it’s a pervasive thing, by talking about “reaction” as a general topic. I think you’d be better off pointing out specific people on the left and right who are acting like tweakers, as Lobohan was, than you are making such broad-brush claims.
I may not be an adjudicator of the truth, but I’ve certainly called out folks like Rand Rover and Shodan and ElvisLives and Der Trihs when they all say stupid stuff [edit: unlike Shodan, of course, I have no trouble naming names when it comes to my list of poor posters]. I don’t think I’ve ever made broad-brush comments about the conservatives of this board. That’s because I think calling out specific posters is a much more productive strategy than making general blanket statements.
Or it’s that Bricker tends to pose things in a very confrontational and accusatory way, and people get riled up and want to respond to it.
This topic gets very confusing and hard to talk about, because we’re talking about differences-between-differences-between-reactions and so forth, but I want to bring up one other general topic, which is the distinction between differences-of-volume and differences-of-substance. That is, here’s the thing that I think is TOTALLY unavoidable which ought to be taken-for-granted:
A conservative politician is caught in a scandal, and lots of people on the SDMB complain about it and say he was bad, but then a liberal politician is caught in a very similar scandal, and fewer people on the SDMB complain about it.
That’s a difference in reaction mostly just of amount and volume… Bricker spends lots of time attempting to point these out, and I think these are almost entirely benign.
As opposed to this:
A conservative politician is caught in a scandal, and lots of people on the SDMB complain about it, and very specifically say that a scandal of this sort is one that demands instant resignation; then a liberal politician is caught in a scandal that is very similar, and lots of people on the SDMB suddenly defend that politician and say that a scandal of that sort is really quite minor and in no way demands resignation.
THAT would be far more serious evidence of liberal hypocrisy, because people are not just reacting more or less, but actually taking differing and potentially contradictory positions… although even then there’s the question of whether the group of liberals doing the attacking in the first case had any overlap with the group of liberals doing the defending in the second case, and even then there’s the question of whether the two scandals really are all that similar and even THEN, in the extremely unlikely hypothetical where you come up with utterly and completely ironclad proof that some number of people on the SDMB actually DO have double standards and actually ARE hypocrites, well, then, what next? Unless your proof applies to some really extremely large portion of the SDMB liberal population, what have you really accomplished?
All of which is my very lengthy way of trying to make part of my larger point, which is that all of this accusation-of-hypocrisy business is just a big fucking waste of time because it’s NEVER EVER EVER going to accomplish anything. What’s the end game? Is there really a hypothetical future in which Shodan goes on a massive typing spree of brilliance and comes up with a perfectly crafted point and all the SDMB liberals admit “gosh, we really WERE hypocrites that whole time”, and then everyone becomes fair and balanced and we sit on the hill side singing kumbayahs together? Of course not. (As opposed to other SDMB debates about actual issues, as opposed to levels of hypocrisy, where it’s at least not outside the realm of possibility that sometimes people’s minds change, or at least people have their mental horizons opened or changed in some minor fashion…)
(a) given how much I bitch about Shodan describing liberals as “the usual suspects” and people using phrases like the liberal hive mind, it would be pretty hypocritical (hey, there’s that word again!) of me to claim to speak for all liberals
(b) I suspect that the really basic point of “liberal posts on the SDMB as it exists today in the context of this political climate will get reactions that are not precisely identical from conservative posts” is pretty universally agreed upon… but stepping from there to “all liberals all agree about what the right way is to react to Bricker, and whether he is or is not (insert insulting or complimentary or grudingly approving adjective here)” is a bit of a stretch.
But “reaction” is the general complaint. Lobohan does the vituperative attack, and I see that as a problem.
No one else steps up and takes him to task, and I see that as a bigger problem. Here, after I posted the latest example, and he’s criticized by someone with the correct politics, he immediately dials it back a notch and becomes more contrite.
So the “reaction” I refer to is not just – or even principally – the poor treatment from the few, but the silence from the many which creates the safe haven for the poor treatment to continue and flourish.
So, do you get some sort of deal on the lumber for your crosses or what?
Several people chided me in this very thread.
Admittedly, I attacked you, but you have behaved like a crazy person in that thread so it’s not like I was snippy in a generic thread you posted in GD. I think you’ll find my GD behavior as reasonable. You’ve spent the better part of six months advocating for voter suppression, one calm post on your part doesn’t make the rest of the thread vanish.
Let’s keep on track here. You should post examples of threads in GD were you are attacked without acting in a vile manner first.
Well, as I just laid out above, I think there’s a problem that goes beyond a few vocal posters; complicit in the poor behavior of the few is the acquiesence of the many.
But it’s certainly not an effort on the part of the many to suppress. It has that effect, but it’s by no means intentional. I’m hoping that this thread changes that a bit.
And I will take a more active role in reminding others – and myself! – that it’s not a vast conspiracy, just an unfortunate unplanned effect.
Again: be the change you want. If Lobohan is acting obnoxious to you, call him out on it, and if you need to, ask others to comment on his post. Don’t pre-emptively criticize everyone else for not calling him out.
And be sure you’re spending at least as much time calling out obnoxious conservatives as you expect others to spend calling out obnoxious liberals. When was the last time that, unbidden, you chided Shodan or Rand Rover for their posts?
This is, I think, a good illustration of what concerns me.
I can be treated in a vile manner because I advocate for voter suppression.
But I don’t agree that I’m advocating for voter suppression. I say I’m advocating for strong identity checking at the polls, which I believe is of great value. I understand that you disagree, but why does your disagreement boil over into fury? My view is not a niche view. It’s shared by many people. It’s not a matter of scientific proof that my view is wrong. It’s a matter of opinion: you choose to weigh the relevant factors and reach a different result than I.
I’m sure I won’t find examples of you calling me a cum pig in GD, because you presumably value your posting privileges.
Oh jesus! You’ve been acting like a real bitch in that particular thread. Your attitude of “suck it! It was passed by the legislature so neener neener” is loathsome. You elicit hostile comments with a hostile attitude and then cut and paste them here, crying about how unfair it is.
Nut up.