No. Again, I take that as BLEEDIN’ OBVIOUS. You, however, only admitted two possibilities for our disagreement. If we’re discussing possible reasons for our disagreement, then sure, it’s bleedin’ obvious that one possibility is that I’m wrong. But I have no real interest in such a meta-navel-gazing discussion; you’re the one that brought it up.
No it wouldn’t be such evidence, and no you’re not dealing with a weasel; you’re dealing with someone who addresses issues precisely, not one of your drunken ignorant buddies down at the bar.
In the case of someone who accepts sources when they’re rightist but not when they’re leftist, there are a couple of possibilities:
They only accept sources from the right;
They reject all sources from the left.
These are two different possibilities. How, for example, do they deal with sources like C-SPAN, Wikipedia, or the writings of Julius Caesar?
And that’s precisely my point. You put the two ideas “they like right-wing sources” and “they only like right-wing sources” as identical. They’re not. I can reasonably conclude someone likes right-wing sources without reasonably concluding they only like right-wing sources. Indeed, if someone really only likes right-wing sources, to the extent of rejecting C-SPAN, the writings of a beekeeper who meditates on producing honey, and the IKEA instruction manuals, they’re insane and not worth talking to.
So I’ll give you this much ground. If you’re talking to aforementioned lunatic, then yes, you may make the statement about their lunacy that they only don’t hate a source because it’s right-wing. Otherwise, and in the real world, it’s not remotely equivalent to saying they like right-wing sources.
When I play games, moron, I roll dice. This is my trying to simplify things for a puny intellect.
Sure. And if your future imaginative statements are limited to that absurd level of vagueness—“Oh yeah! You people piling on Joe Paterno, in the time of slavery YOU WOULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM WHAT YOU’RE DOING NOW!”–then I’ll not mock you for that particular flaw in your argument.
But of course you’re not imagining such vague things. You’re imagining specificities, and while I always encourage students to include details in their fantasy stories, I also want them to recognize the stories as fantasies.
Sex scandals are actually a special case, because liberals don’t need to make that claim. The party line here is that while it’s true that both parties have sex scandals, only Republicans are to blame, because while sex scandals are inherently no big deal, Republicans are held to a special standard since they are the self proclaimed party of Family Values, and any Republican involved in a sex scandal is therefore a hypocrite, a charge that does not apply to Democrats. This is a much easier line of attack than the notion that only Republicans are involved in sex scandals, so this is the one that gets put forward.
Well I agree in general that if you’re hoping for a constructive debate you’re better off taking a more polite tone.
I would note a couple of points, though. 1) Many times the tone has already been set by other posters. 2) Many times people who are ostensibly objecting to tone are really objecting to substance.
Not sure I understand this. Obviously the burden of proof WRT accusations of hypocrisy would be on the accuser.
That’s up to the accuser. Generally the latter two will be what’s meant.
Yeah, it can happen. But not often enough to make it worthwhile to change the substance of posts
Bricker is not a saint, and even saints can have irritating habits sometimes. So I’m sure Bricker would get on some people’s nerves even if he was liberal. (FWIW, I myself agree with one particular criticism of Bricker, i.e. his habit of insisting on looking at many issues in a purely legalistic framework, and - IIRC - I criticized him in one of the Trayvon Martin threads for insisting that evidence which was not admissable in court was also irrelevant to the discussion.)
What I’m talking about is the level of criticism. Put it this way: look at the first paragraph of Richard Parker’s assessment of Bricker in this thread. IMO, if Bricker’s ideology was mainstream for this board, then that would be the mainstream view of him as a poster.
OK, but your initial assertion was that there was no point of even discussing the issue because it’s so obviously true. If you have some uncertainty as to whether even liberals agree with you, then it is at least worth discussing.
What’s ironic about this is that you start off by declaring that you’re not a weasel and then immediately launch into the exact type of weaseling that I had speculated you would have engaged in.
I mean, here I was, having to structure what was admittedly a tortured statement out of fear that you would pounce of the excluded middle. And now here you are, making a whole mountain out of the excluded middle.
OK, yes, there are sources which are neither conservative or liberal. But the hypothetical we’re discussing involves someone who contrasts liberal versus conservative sources specifically. Whether they would or wouldn’t accept neutral sources is not relevant. The hypothetical case I was thinking of - which is the typical case and likely the situation you were thinking of when you raised it, before expedience pressed you to pretend otherwise - would involve a conservative trying to prove something from a partisan conservative source, and a liberal pointing out that if this same poster saw something in a comparably partisan liberal source they would hate it, i.e. reject it outright. This is comparable to saying that the conservative poster only accepts the source because he likes partisan sources when they slant conservative - and in fact this would be the entire point of raising the issue of the liberal source. And in this case, the evidence would be a pattern of accepting or rejecting partisan sources based on political slant.
What the poster would do if it was the writings of a beekeeper would not factor into the discussion.
It’s sometimes unfortunate that the facts are generally complex enough so as to allow intellectually dishonest ideologues like yourself to cloud the issue by nitpicking extraneous matters.
You can call me names if you like. Perhaps it makes you feel good about yourself. Really smart. Like a teacher dealing with a student. I see you went for that one too.
Myself, I think you’re playing games. You’ve gotten out on a limb with a claim that you can’t back up, and are tripped up on your own posts, and need to obfuscate things. Actually works too.
I should note that the specific example you cited the cat story for (post #351) was not JP. It was your pathetic attempt to deny that “voter suppression is the political purpose of most voter ID laws” is the equivalent of “if these laws did not accomplish voter suppression their supporters would not be pushing for them”. This is not at all “imagining specificities” and is simply another way of stating the same thing. Your shift to JP is another convenient shift by the Artful Dodger, because you decided to try a new tack of claiming that the issue was vague versus specific and JP fit in better with that line.
But I would also note that from a logical standpoint, there’s no fundamental difference between vague statements and specific ones. Obviously, it will be in general harder to make precise assessments than vaguer ones. That’s why you say things like “for the most part” and similar such. But in broader terms, it’s not hard to say that, having made the assessment that - for example - most posters in a given thread are acting out of a lynch mob mentality, that most would also be subject to that same mentality in other circumstances.
And it’s pretty clear that you, LHOD, would do the same.
I’m more likely to try and rebut a post if its logic (rather than political philosophy) seems wrong. For example, several months ago Romney was alleged to have evaded a question about medical marijuana. The charge was absurd; I said so; Bricker himself complimented me for objectivity. (It was only later that I learned that any mixing of Bricker and objectivity is laughable.) The first time I responded to Shodan angrily, I didn’t know his politics: I was offended by a non-political post with a peculiar combination of ignorance and condescension.
But there’s only so many hours in a day. I often have an urge to add my comment to a thread, but resist. I ignore most of the “errors” I see in both centrist and right-wing posts; is it hypocritical that I’m more likely to react to an opinion I strongly disagree with?
[off-topic:]
Something interesting showed up in two recent threads. Perhaps someone can articulate it well enough to pose a question about in GD or IMHO. In the voter suppression thread we learn that right-wingers rested their case on legality – Ohio’s GOP could suppress voters, so they should. Morality – or rather immorality – didn’t enter into it. In a thread contrasting Clinton’s harmless lie about Monica with Bush’s cynical lie leading to the hugely immoral Trillion Dollar Blunder, rightwingers based their case on the legality that Clinton was under oath and Bush wasn’t.
Would the rightwingers reverse these stances if the political alignments were reversed? The right-wing likes to describe its difference from the left as a matter of morality rather than legality; do these examples contradict that?
An interesting side discussion, but you’ve avoided answering my question entirely… So, if a Republican has a BRIBERY scandal, and there’s a thread discussing it, then bringing up a Democratic BRIBERY scandal is only actually logically relevant if someone in the thread is making a slightly outrageous claim like “ONLY Republicans have BRIBERY scandals”. Which is certainly not a claim that is made very often… and if it is, then you have my blessing to refute the living fuck out of it.
I will note, by the way, that when Bricker comes into a thread about a Republican bribery scandal and brings up a Democratic bribery scandal, he then makes the claim that there wasn’t a similar thread about the Democratic bribery scandal, ergo, liberal hypocrisy, QED.
Well, yes, that’s how it SHOULD be. The next time I see someone making an accusation of hypocrisy and presenting anything even close to proof will be the first.
Again, it’s usually left vague. And its also worth pointing out that the concept of a group being hypocritical is kind of weird. What if 20% of SDMB liberals believe one thing and 20% believe the opposite. Does that make the group as a whole hypocritical? How? I don’t want to say that it’s impossible for a group to be hypocritical, because there are certainly times when a group clearly holds a collective consensus. For instance, I think it’s fair to say that SDMB liberals favor legalizing gay marriage. And one can imagine SDMB liberals also having similar consensus support for another position that was in clear philosophical opposition with legalizing gay marriage, or something like that. But I’d argue that it’s somewhat unusual for there to be a consensus like that… on most important issues of the day, plenty of SDMB liberals have opinions that vary widely.
My claim is that the board’s reaction to Bricker is due partly to his ideology and partly to his, uh, Brickerness. Do you agree or disagree?
Can you quote precisely what I initially said that you’re talking about? It’s certainly possible that I phrased it poorly, or even that I (gasp) overstated or misstated my position. The position that I think I’ve been trying to communicate is that there’s a very narrow distillation of the issue, which I expressed earlier as “Anyone who claims that the SDMB left, as a whole, will react with precise objectively equality to left-favorable vs right-favorable threads is insane and wrong.”, which I think is pretty inarguable. But (a) that’s only a VERY narrow and not particularly interesting statement, (b) even if everyone agrees with that position, it’s still worth discussions the implications and limitations and so forth and (c) “pretty inarguable” and “no SDMB liberal would do anything other than completely agree with my framing of the situation” are two very different things.
It’s generally implied or stated explicitly in these threads (usually the latter).
I can’t speak for Bricker. But if his point was that posters were not using parallel Democratic scandals to claim or project that bribery is a Democratic trait, then this is a valid counterpoint. That being that the judgment that “the latest scandal can be used to show a broader pattern” is a suspect one.
Collective consensus in this context doesn’t mean that everyone agrees. It means that this is the mainstream opinion, and the group in aggregate weighs in this direction. The collective consensus of the Democratic party resists cuts in social spending and the collective consensus of the Republican party resists tax increases, even though there can be any number of exceptions to these patterns.
What adds complexity to the matter is that 1) positions are not either/or but can vary a lot by degree on the same issue and 2) the nature of group consensus is that sometimes a small but passionately minority has more influence than a larger but apathetic majority. These are true both on message boards and IRL. But I think if the overwhelming majority of leftists/rightists posting about a given issue take one side of the issue then it’s reasonable to take that position as the collective consensus of the group. So if you find that threads about the same issue tended to find posters from the same side tending strongly to different positions based on whether it benefited their side at the time, it’s fair to note that this collective consensus judgment appears to derive from bias.
I agree, but don’t find that meaningful.
If it’s true that if it were not for his ideology he would be considered in the top 10% of posters with the same Brickerness, and if not for his ideology or Brickerness he’d be in the top 5%, then it’s fair to point out the ideology issue when he’s being attacked for his Brickerness.
It’s actually the post you just quoted, although you left off the last sentence. The paragraph went:
The post that I contrasted to this was:
I don’t see any difference between the formulation which you said “everyone already knows to be true” and said Rand Rover’s repeated attempts to prove were “pointless and stupid” and the later formulation which you acknowledged might not be shared by other liberals.
You’re addressing this the wrong way. Do you have any beliefs you hold to be untrue?
To blame for what? It’s not an inchoate accusation of hypocrisy: the Republicans made “Protection of Marriage” one of their pledges in their 2004 platform. Since they were elected on that platform, they should be drummed out of the party if they fail to meet that standard.
Using an understanding of motivation to predict behaviour is one concept. To the extent that your predictions are more specific, you would need to have better and/or more comprehensive evidence and understanding or need to hedge more in your prediction. But fundamentally it’s the same concept. If you accept that you can do one, then you need to accept that you can do the other, subject to the above qualifiers.
Bricker certainly SEEMS to be advocating the position that the only meaningful way to judge actions such as voter suppression is their legality, with morality being totally irrelevant, although it’s very hard to pin down whether he’s in fact saying that. If he is, in fact, saying that, then it’s pretty logically clear that it is something that Ohio’s GOP should do. After all, if the only thing that matters is whether it’s legal, and it is legal, and it helps them advance their agenda (by stealing/winning elections), then they owe it to their supporters to do it… the same way that while I think the entire concept of paid political advertising is fundamentally screwy, I certainly think that in the world we do in fact live in, the Democratic party SHOULD engage in paying for political advertising.
But I’m not sure that’s what Septimus was referring to…
Every time I see this thread pop up I think if Dark Helmet saying ‘Fooled you!!’ and snatching the swartz away from the OP. Sorry, just had to share…carry on…
It is? I think we might be coming to the point where our perceptions of threads is colored so strongly by our positions that we just won’t agree. If you can link to a thread in which there’s a bribery scandal and someone says “hey, this bribery scandal proves that Republicans are all corrupt, and of course it would never happen to democrats”, then I’ll happily admit that you’ve found a good example, and that whoever posted that was stupid. But more likely there’s a thread where there are lots of liberals saying “man, that guy did a bad thing”, and a few using somewhat hyperbolic language which vaguely skirts the line of implying that this proves something about all Republicans, and then Der Trihs popping up with one of his preposterously overstated conclusions about how all Republicans are baby-rapists; and you read that, and you see the hyperbolic language, and see no one disagreeing with it, and you mentally categorize that as a thread in which liberals drew ungrounded conclusions about Republicans in general based on a single incident; whereas I read that thread, assume that the people speaking with some hyperbole are just choosing their words poorly and aren’t trying to seriously imply anything, and I never bother arguing with DT about things like that… and I walk away thinking “yeah, that was a thread in which liberals were criticizing an isolated incident”. And, really, neither one of us is necessarily wrong.
A really key issue is that Bricker doesn’t just make comparisons between “here’s how you reacted to A, and here’s how you reacted to B”, but between “here’s how you reacted to A, and here’s how you DIDN’T react to B”. Which is a fundamentally pretty unreasonable thing to do. For instance, in the voter ID thread, he drew an equivalence between voter ID laws and some shenanigans that Democrats in the Massachusetts legislature engaged in a while back; then used the fact that I had never posted anything about the MA stuff as evidence that I was not critical of the Dem action, and that therefore I was blindly partisan and all the points I made about voter ID were thus weakened. Which fails in at least 3 ways: (a) not posting at all is NOT the same as posting. It is impossible to draw conclusions about what something thinks about an issue because they did NOT post about it, without some pretty extreme hypothetical going on. (b) As far as I’m concerned, the burden of proof is on Bricker if he wants to claim that the voter ID situation and the MA situation are so similar that they can be compared in that way, which he repeatedly did not do, and (c) even IF it were the case that I, MaxTheVool, were a hypocrite, that does not really either strengthen or weaken actual logical arguments I make for or against any position. I mean, I think Der Trihs is a crazy person, but I don’t refute logical arguments he makes by saying “well, my response to your points 1 through 4 is… you’re a crazy person, so I’m right”.
Sure, but again, there’s a burden of proof issue here. If you’re going to wander into a thread where SDMB liberals are discussing a bribery scandal, and you want to throw around accusations of hypocrisy at the SDMB left as a group, then it’s up to you to (a) make it explicit that you are doing so, (b) explain what position you believe SDMB liberals hold with respect to bribery when it comes from the left, and when it comes from the right, and (c) provide some evidence that that consensus exists. I’m not saying it’s IMPOSSIBLE to do that in a meaningful way, but it would require a ton-load of evidence and so forth… something a lot more than just “oh, we all know you SDMB liberals would say X if Y happened”, which is the level of proof that we usually get. (Which is not trying to say that righties are lazy or something, just that really meaningfully making an argument of that sort would be frickin’ exhaustively hard to do, which is part of why it’s just a big waste of time.)
Eh… again, if someone makes an extreme claim like “Bricker is attacked the way he is SOLELY because of his argument style, not because of his ideology”, then I agree that your points are valid and relevant. But how often does that really happen? And again, the kind of response you’re proposing is one which is likely to derail the thread into a bunch of butthurt defensiveness… I mean, I’m not trying to be a junior mod and tell you you can’t or shouldn’t do that, but I think that it is legitimately possible to have an interesting and productive discussion of the pros and cons of Bricker’s posting style which mostly ignores his ideology, but if you jump into such a discussion and say “you liberals aren’t trying to pretend that you don’t object to Bricker because of his ideology are you? because (cough cough) that would make you sounds-like-shmypocrites”, or whatever, well, there goes any chance of the original productive part of the conversation getting anywhere… and that applies even if the point you are making is 100% valid.
Well, I’ve kind of lost track of my precise mindset when I wrote that original post 5 pages ago. So I will nullify its existence and restate my actual, current position, which is that:
(a) I believe right-leaning and left-leaning threads on the SDMB will get differing responses.
(b) I believe this is pretty self-evidently true, and neither very surprising nor particularly revealing or meaningful about the character of SDMB liberals or any such thing
(c) I have made that statement, and the further statement that I suspect most if not all SDMB liberals agree with that position, repeatedly in this thread, and no liberal has popped up to disagree
(d) Therefore, accusing liberals of responding differently to threads based on their content, as if that’s some meaningful accusation that we try to deny and weasel out of, is a pretty meaningless and stupid thing to do, which is what I felt like Rand Rover was doing
(e) All of that said, I don’t want to claim points (a) through (d) as some sort of Official Liberal Position or anything, they’re just my view.
I’ll use Bricker as the counterexample. My sentence you quoted is ambiguous and a paraphrase, but I think open-minded good-spirited people will understand my claim.
Since communication between the left and right seems to be a serious problem, I’d like to hear from you what specific implication of my intended claim you think is a false take on Bricker’s view. I hope you make a sincere effort to understand the claim I attempted to make.
Right, that’s not *why *he argues it should be done. His absolute party-before-country, screw-democracy attitude is why he argues that, and often in quite childish terms at that. He argues that it can be done legally only by way of self-justification.
Randy, a hint sincerely intended to help you avoid future embarrassment here: When commenting on what is said in a thread, it normally helps to have read the thread first. If you can’t be arsed, then it helps not to admit you haven’t read it. K?