My terse form assumed a “because it would benefit them” at the end. Without that one could argue that my claim [right-wingers think that] Ohio’s GOP could suppress voters, so they should
could be extrapolated to [right-wingers think that] Ohio’s GOP could dress up as zombies and set their hair on fire, so they should
Is that inference the basis of Rand Rover’s objection? If so, I should have been clearer. But I have been told by an SDMB right-winger that they like “colorful language.” I thought my point would have been clear to anyone with a sincere desire to understand it.
I don’t want to make the whole hypocrisy issue about Bricker specifically, and I don’t know what he may have done in any particular thread. As regards to your lettered points:
a) That’s true if the charge is leveled at an individual but not if it’s leveled at a group. You would expect that two stories of comparable newsworthiness would attract roughly the same amount of attention from the masses.
b) Agree, more or less. I don’t think the concept of “burden of proof” really applies in debates, but obviously the more evidence someone can bring to bear the more effective they will be.
c) The sum of a person’s arguments can’t be ad homonym. But if you also present a legitimate argument, you can back it up by pointing out that your opponent apparently accepts this argument in other circumstances.
ISTM that the standards for hypocrisy accusations should be the same as those for any other argument on this MB. The standards you put forth are ideal for any argument, but are not always practical, or achieved.
It’s implied and understood.
No one ever starts a thread saying “I hate Bricker’s guts because of his ideology, but he also has a couple of other minor faults as well …”. Obviously almost anyone attacking Bricker is going to attribute all their antipathy to non-ideological issues. So there’s some value in pointing out that at least a good portion of this antipathy is likely due to ideology.
Leaving aside that I am generally down on sacrificing substance in the name of interesting and productive discussions, as above, what “interesting and productive discussion of the pros and cons of Bricker’s posting style” are you referring to? Would the OP of this thread qualify in your view? In my experience in situations like this, there can be a minority of rational posters up for an interesting and productive discussion, but the well will inevitably be poisoned by hysterical shouters anyway, so there’s nothing to be gained by further suppressing valid counterpoints.
I’m not sure how far I’m going to go down this line, but as a suggestion I would observe that if you want to use Bricker as a counterexample and you want your point to be clear to anyone with a sincere desire to understand it, a link and quote(s) would be helpful.
What’s truly fantastic is that you appear to consider yourself in the “rational posters” camp and not a hysterical shouter, despite having told me that I’d probably have participated in a lynch mob under other circumstances. The level of cognitive dissonance displayed through such actions is remarkable.
I don’t recall having addressed that statement to you - it was addressed to an unspecified “most of” a group of posters, of whom you may or may not have been among (I don’t recall).
That aside, the premise of your post is that you consider it impossible for a rational poster to conclude that someone like you would probably have participated in a lynch mob. This is entirely based on your own high opinion of yourself, which I don’t share.
And this is where your fantasy life becomes so contemptibly stupid. You didn’t say that it’s barely within the realm of possibility that I would do the same. You said that it was pretty clear that I would do the same. [edit: it occurs to me on rereading that you may have meant I’d make the same assessment–which is just as stupid a claim, but not as offensive a claim. Is that the particular stupid claim you meant to make?]
Contemptible, stupid, and utterly irrational. You are not remotely one of the rational posters that you think you are.
You’re getting close on edit, but not all the way there.
It’s not clear that you would make that assessment. But it’s clear that having made that particular assessment, that you would then extrapolate that to other circumstances.
Not stupid. Unpleasant for a sensitive and delicate soul like yourself, apparently. But on the mark.
I’ve for the most part ignored the argument between you and LHOD… but unless you’re saying something very different from what I think you’re saying, what you’re saying is pretty ridiculous and extremely offensive. What is certainly sounds like you’re saying is that you have read what LHOD posted in an SDMB thread, which is at the end of the day just pixels and bits, and you can predict from that how he would act in the real world in a situation involving killing innocent people. Even if every single observation you made about his posting style were accurate, and I have no reason to think that they were, it’s still a nearly insurmountable leap to go from posts to physical-world-actions. So even if you were predicting something fairly benign it would be ridiculous. When you’re predicting that he would be a member of a lynch mob, it’s both ridiculous and incredibly insulting… insulting in a way that totally transcends the usual “you’re a stupidhead” “no, you’re a stupidhead” insults that fill up so much of the BBQ pit.
I wrote a post for the purpose of clarifying that I had not predicted that LHOD would participate in a lynch mob (after he himself seemed to have also come to that realization) and you interpreted that post as being a prediction that he would be a member of a lynch mob?
Please reread.
[FTR I stand by my assessment of most of the posters in the other thread.]
I just did, and I still don’t see what it was you’re trying to say, if it wasn’t that. And if it wasn’t that, then it was something where you were pretty strongly IMPLYING that, given that LHOD and I (and I hope I’ve demonstrated in this thread that although I strongly disagree with you about a lot of things, I’m arguing in good faith, not just making up random shit) both read it that way.
If nothing else, using language involving lynch mobs and then saying “not that I am actually saying you would be lynching someone” is a bit like comparing someone to nazis, but, you know, not the holocaust part.
You’ve completely misunderstood the exchange. It had nothing at all to do with whether LHOD would or would not participate in a lynch mob. This whole lynch mob thing relates to another thread, that someone else introduced here, and which LHOD then seized on as a way to attack me.
And what he’s specifically criticizing me for is for claiming the ability to assess what other people would do in other circumstances. To which my response has been that he himself makes assessments of other people’s motivations, and this carries some degree of predictive ability.
It’s been very difficult to pin him down on this, because he keeps bouncing back and forth. At some point he tried to make a distinction between assessing motivation and predicting action in other circumstances. But in any event, post #363 ended off making this point - that you could make assessments of other people’s motivations and that once you did so, you had make some level of predictive ability. In the example at hand, that amounted to if you assessed that they had a lynch mob mentality, then you would assign a high likelihood that this mentality would express itself in other circumstances as well.
I ended off with “And it’s pretty clear that you, LHOD, would do the same.” meaning that it’s clear that he himself makes assessments of other people’s motivations, and having done so, he would make predictions as to what they would do in other circumstances. (If he happened to make the assessment that a certain group was acting out of lynch mob mentality, I have no doubt he would judge them likely to have acted that way in other circumstances, and so on.)
Leaving aside the above, this seems inconsistent with your previous post, in which you made a big deal about the difference between posting on a MB and RL action. In light of that, I would think you would be big on the difference between saying someone would be supportive of lynch mobs (which is what I actually said in the other thread) and saying they would physically string someone up.
FWIW, the “lynch mob” sub-theme was introduced to this thread in post #291. If you haven’t been following along since then you might have a hard time understanding some of the subsequent posts.
Maybe the ambiguity is whether you mean “be supportive of lynch mobs” in the sense of “stay at home, but post after the fact that they thought the lynch mob was justified” vs “be one of the guys out in the street cheering as the lynch mob dragged the guy off to his death”. That’s a HUGE distinction to me, because while the second one is certainly not as bad as the people actually doing the lynching, it’s clearly doing something that immediately helps in killing an innocent person; whereas the first, while pretty odious, is still firmly in the land of just-saying-things-on-the-internet.
That said, I just don’t have the energy to really read all the posts in that lengthy exchange, so I’ll leave the rest of it all alone.
Well my original words in the other thread were "In other times and places it would be obvious to these people that we need to burn the heretics, hang the witches, lynch the nigger, blacklist the commie-lover etc. etc. " which is more like the first. But I may possibly have been careless about the distinction in discussing it in this thread, because while there’s certainly a difference, I don’t think it’s all that HUGE (in the context of which type of person would do it), and has in any event not been significant in this discussion.
Yes, you may possibly have been in some manner analogous to perhaps some of the more esoteric aspects of conceivably some of the better-quality varieties of douchebag.
Actually, I don’t think you would, and this is a major crux here. Let’s assume for the moment that the SDMB is an idealized version of the way it is now… so the same ratio of more liberal than conservative posters, but all posters who are intellectual open and honest, and generally willing and able to apply to same ethical standards to their side as to the other side. In that ideal world, two scandals happen, one on the left and one on the right, and a thread is started about each. Because it’s in idealworld, you’re going to find almost no one who goes into the first thread and posts “hey, this really isn’t a big deal, the evidence is still out, this doesn’t in any way render this person unfit to govern… and this CERTAINLY doesn’t reflect badly on Dems as a whole” and then goes into the second thread and posts “wow, a scandal of this sort is so gross and huge that it demands that this jackass resign instantly. And really, this reflects badly on Republicans as a whole”. But I think you’ll still get a lot more traffic in the second thread, because while the leftist from idealworld are too honest to apply different ethical standards, they’re still going to want to go and post more where it’s more fun to post, because that’s why they’re on the SDMB, to have fun, not to server as Impartial Arbiters of Fairness. And, for most of us, it’s more fun to discuss a topic where the other guy did something wrong than a topic where our guy did something wrong.
Ummm, I think that’s tangential to what I’m saying. Here’s my point: I think Karl “Turdblossom” Rove is INCREDIBLY partisan, and I think that he will pretty much always argue for the conservative side of any position. But he’s also smart and knowledgeable. If I was for some weird reason debating him about issue X, and he laid out some point by point arguments, I do not believe it would be relevant for me to respond by saying “well, I know and you know that if issue X were flipped around, you would be arguing the other side of it… therefore your points are invalid”.
Well, we’re getting pretty deep down the navel-gazing hole here, but… I think there’s a distinction here, which is that I think there are lots of points you might make about another poster for which it’s fairly easy to come up with at least relevant pieces of evidence… for instance, “MaxTheVool likes to post long and somewhat tedious posts full of things organized in little lists”. What’s the evidence for that claim? Well, here are 3 different posts in the last two weeks alone in which he did that. OK, fair enough, that’s at least prima facie evidence of this claim… MaxTheVool can now defend himself if he wants, but I think we’d all agree that the initial charge was, at least, a reasonably supported one. But that’s different from “MaxTheVool is a partisan hypocrite”. What’s the evidence for that claim? Well, here’s a thread in which he’s attacking a Republican idea. And, this one time, there was this Democratic idea, see, and it was kinda similar to that Republican idea, and he didn’t post in the thread about it…
Do you see the distinction I’m trying to make? It would take a very unusual set of circumstances for a typical-SDMB-post-sized set of evidence to be prima facie meaningful evidence for hypocrisy, in a way that is not true about many of the other things we argue about.
I guess I just don’t agree.
We’ve come back to where we’ve been a lot of times in the past, which is a question of (a) tone, and (b) what the point is to begin with. For instance, the discussion that you and I have been having, which I think has been at least reasonably interesting and informative on the scale of SDMB discussions, is at least partly about Bricker’s posting style. As far as I remember, at no point did you ask me how much of my criticism of Bricker’s posting style is due to his ideology… but if you did, you could have done so in a polite and inquisitive fashion, or you could have started out in an attacking and accusatory and assume-Max-is-already-guilty fashion. One of those two approaches would have been likely to hijack and derail the discussion, which would have been a shame… because we would have lost the chance to discuss an interesting topic, and what would we possibly gain? (And note that even if it in fact turns out that I am a level 3 hypocrite and you were able to demonstrate that, well, what then? Assuming that I’ve said at least one thing that’s even the slightest bit informative or thought provoking this thread, would absolute proof that I’m a hypocrite render that thing suddenly retroactively non-thought-provoking?)
I don’t think I’m trying to suppress anything. I’m not proposing a new rule or going around issuing red cards and trying to get people to go on not-responding-to-accusations-of-hypocrisy strike. As for the OP of this thread, well, what about it? It was someone who was pissed off at Bricker, referring to various specific things that happened in threads that I personally never read. I do not believe that the OP has an implication of “oh, by the way, I’m super-fair and super-non-partisan and this pitting is due SOLELY to Bricker’s posting style, and is not at ALL influenced by his ideology”. And, as I said, I think there are some pretty interesting discussions that have come about in this thread, even with that pretty accusatory OP.
