Your inability to understand the issues you’re advocating isn’t the point. If you kill people because you honestly believe they’re demons, that doesn’t mean you aren’t a killer.
Because in that thread you laughed at the idea that poor people would be kept from voting. Because your final, last ditch argument amounted to, “Bwahahaha, my way is the law!”
And when shown that your position would cause many more people to find it difficult to vote than would be averted from committing in-person fraud, you don’t care.
Look, two honest people can disagree on an issue. I agree that voter ID is a good idea. But it needs to be matched with a huge, good-faith effort to get IDs into every hand. The Republicans this cycle were washed into unilateral control of many state legislatures and over-reached. It’s understandable. But attempting to enshrine lasting partisan advantage when temporarily in charge is as obviously an un-American thing as can happen.
However, you can’t point out what actual value it achieves, or even that the problem you claim it would address even exists, nor can you deign to respond to careful and reality-based explanations of the real, extensive damage it would cause. Therefore your claim as to what you actually support has no credibility.
Because you’re lying. Because your repetition of your lies, in the apparent expectation that we’ll come to accept them, is insulting. And because your lying is in the cause of undermining democracy.
As if that’s an excuse.
Yes it is. It’s based on facts that do not exist, and in spite of facts that do.
We’re all weighing facts against lies. It should not be a surprise that facts win.
So if that’s the issue, are you saying you haven’t seen RR say vile things about people, or that you’ve called him on it?
For myself, I don’t think I’ve called people very often if at all on their saying ugly things to one another in the Pit, because you pays your money and you takes your chances here. I think Lobohan is being ridiculous here, even though I agree with him in broader strokes that voter suppression is the political purpose of most voter ID laws. But the vile epithets aren’t really such a problem.
OK, not technically impossible. Although FWIW I personally think Bricker tends to post in a rather measured way. Sometimes the actual implications of what he’s saying are pretty damning and I think that’s what gets people riled up, but his actual tone is almost always calm and factual. Especially by the standards of this board.
This is not necessarily the case.
This actually ties in to the distinction I’ve been making earlier. Because if the focus is just on the specific conservative/liberal politician caught in the latest scandal, then you have a point. But a board with a strong slant like this, generally whenever a conservative politician is caught in any sort of misdeed, the case is seized on to make the broader point that “conservatives are a bunch of …”. In this context, it’s completely valid to point to liberal politicians caught in the same or similar scandals. Not simply to illustrate the hypocrisy of the liberal posters - although that can be amusing too - but to make the valid point that this particular issue is not a conservative/liberal one as is being argued.
I don’t think pointing out that liberals are hypocrites is necessarily an end to itself (other than amusement). But even here, it has a valid logical function.
Because the fact is, that despite a lot of high-minded and self-righteous preening from certain quarters here, at the end of the day there are a lot of very smart and honest people on either side of the conservative/liberal divide. Which means that as a practical matter neither viewpoint is going to be refuted in a mathematical sense and ultimately the vast majority of issues are going to boil down to some sort of judgment call, and everyone will make a judgment based on their own experiences, thought processes, education and the like (heavily influenced by various types of bias, of course). Now this is not to say that there are not certain specific arguments for/against liberal/conservative positions on various issues that are not completely bogus and refutable. But for the most part even here it will come down to a judgment call.
And here’s where the “hypocrisy” issue becomes relevant. IMO. Because suppose - for example - you have someone - or a group of people - arguing strenuously for or against something like the Senate filibuster. Now that’s a judgment call - majority rule and progress versus protection for the minority and minority viewpoints and compromise (or whatever). You could justifiably take either side of the issue. And here is where it’s useful to point out to people that they or their group held the exact opposite position on this issue when it benefited them. Because this illustrates how arbitrary and self-serving this current judgment is, which tends to depreciate the value of it significantly and deservedly so.
I don’t see this big distinction between this issue and any other issue. Very very few people are going to change and suddenly accept that they personally are biased hypocrites. But I don’t see many people backing down in any debates here, and I certainly see a lot who should.
The only real hope of changing anyone’s mind is for that of the neutral bystanders, and I’m not sure these would be swayed any less for this type of argument than any other. And in particular, as I noted earlier, there’s a weight of “public opinion” that can help sway the debate in its own right, and pointing out the biased basis of this “public opinion” can counteract this.
But more than any of that, the real truth is that the primary point of debating this issue is for the entertainment of people who happen to like debating this issue. Which is pretty much the point of debating any other type of issue that gets debated here. Either you go for that type of thing or you don’t. To each his own.
No one is asking you to “speak for” anyone. But if your original point was that the matter was so obvious that you criticized anyone for even discussing the issue, so it’s surprising to see you suddenly expressing some uncertainty as to whether your fellow liberals agree with you about it.
The question is not how to react to Bricker but whether in actual fact people react differently to Bricker than to comparable liberals. And if you accept that it’s a given that people’s reaction is heavily influenced by their ideological affinities, I don’t see how it’s possible for that to suddenly cease to be true in the case of Bricker. It would seem to logically follow from your position - which again, you claimed to be obviously true - that someone like Bricker will be treated differently due to his ideology. From which it would follow that at least some (possibly unknowable) portion of the antipathy to Bricker in liberal circles of this MB is derived from his ideology versus the putative reasons being put forth.
[This has been a lengthy post typed in a hurry, as I am logging off for the day shortly. My apologies if it’s poorly written or confusing.]
Yeah, it’s a shame when many people can causally go along with the determinedly negative efforts of a few, without appreciating the greater consequences.
Well, given that he was responding to me, and my post was close to equally as long, and I found his post interesting and intend to respond to it at length later on today… I think your criticism is kind of misplaced, and quite rude.
I think you’re confusing “equally” with “fairly”. I have repeatedly stated in this thread that liberal and conservative viewpoints are not treated EQUALLY on the SDMB. That doesn’t mean that conservative viewpoints are treated UNFAIRLY, as “fair” is a hard-to-define word that contains strong value judgments, and doesn’t really apply here, imho. The moment you start describing the situation as “unfair”, you’re suddenly making implications about the way people act and their implicit responsibilities etc which I think just muddy the issue.
It’s not at all hypocritical for someone to post on a message board differently in one thread than in another. If my example from earlier in this thread comes about and two scandals happen in quick succession, one on each side of the aisle, and in one of them I post 100 times and in the other one I post zero times, that is in no way evidence of the slightest bit of hypocrisy on my part, unless I’ve made some pompous pronouncement claiming that one of my guiding principles in life is to read every single SDMB thread in existence and post equally in all of them regardless of their politics. Which I have certainly never done.
I do not
I agree with this part
Uhh, right? There are plenty of conservatives who complain about what it’s like to be a conservative at the SDMB, and those complaints run a wide gamut from justified to unjustified, from reasoned and thoughtful to whiney and irrelevant. Fairly few liberals complain about what it’s like to be a liberal at the SDMB. But again, that’s hardly surprising, so I’m not sure what your point is.
I would need a precise example of “claim to be applying an impartial standard”. I’m sure there are some examples of liberals who have said things which clearly overstate their own impartiality, from some combination of misspeaking, overstating, or just being smug overconfident jerks. What I do not see is some groundswell of SDMB liberals who frequently and clearly state that they are objective and brilliant purely non-partisan seekers of truth who respond to all threads with nothing but objective intellectual purity. You seem to think that lots of us describe ourselves that way, and I just don’t see it. So… cite?
I don’t think I’m saying precisely “you can’t expect any different, so suck it up”… and I’m certainly not saying anything about a “higher” standard. Conservatives on the SDMB are in a different environment than liberals on the SDMB. That’s how it is, and (as Bricker and Fotheringay-Phipps seem to agree) that’s due more to normal human dynamics than anything unique to SDMB liberals. That’s how the situation is, and (as I’ve said repeatedly) it’s a bad thing, because it makes it hard to be an SDMB conservative, which means that there are fewer of them, which makes the situation worse, and we’ve been in a vicious cycle for a long time.
Well, he’s not a very nice person. Now, I approve of nice people, admire them unstintingly. Just don’t want to hang with them, because they bore me to tears.
I also approve of lectures about non-partisan comity and mutual respect, what is commonly known as “high Broderism”, named after the Dean of Political Pundit Buzzkill. Everybody knows that non-partisan views are superior both morally and intellectually. It is such a widely understood truth that it does not bear repeating. Or, for that matter, examining.
But I’m not a nice person either. And I couldn’t care less that a non-partisan me might be smarter than my partisan self, this stuff doesn’t take that much skull music. Never eat at a place called “Mom’s”, never play poker with a man named “Doc”, and never vote for anyone who doesn’t really give a shit about people.
Really, if all of your impartial and cool non-partisan analysis leaves you with the same convictions and positions as when you began, what good is it?
(a) I have no idea what you’re talking about
(b) I can’t tell who (if anyone) you’re accusing of being a smug self-described independent non-partisan, but I’ve started entire pit threads about that mindset, which I find to be obnoxious and baseless
(c) I can’t save I’ve interacted enough with Fotheringay-Phipps do have established a particularly strong opinion about him one way or the other, but in this thread, he’s being polite and calm. I strongly dislike when people respond to that sort of posting with dismissive rudeness, because it just kills whatever semblance of polite exchange of ideas there may have been.
