Bricker is a Pile of Shit Sculpted into Human Shape

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

And of course, in the thread about James Comey being fired, who didn’t see that obvious liberal hypocrisy card being played several counties away?

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

I think Bricker is basically, and somewhat ironically, the SDMB liberals’ One Black Friend—the one people can point to to reassure themselves that well, it’s not their fault when the next round of accusations that the SDMB is anti-conservative comes around: after all, they think that this one conservative is basically an intelligent and decent guy, so there, no bias.

Because while I keep hearing from people about Bricker’s intelligence and debating skills, when I read his posts, I don’t really see much evidence of either—most of his arguments strike me as poor to the point of hand-waving, or hopelessly vague, and his chief rhetorical tactic seems to be to try and fragment the debate by entangling his interlocutors in pointless side-issues, which most of the time crop up due to his own vagueness and refusal to make a straight point (although I won’t claim any comprehensive familiarity with Bricker’s writings on here, and I’m sure enough digging will eventually reveal a stellar and to-the-point argument by him). Once the ‘debate’ has then moved away far enough from the original point, he may even concede some of the sideshow skirmishes—without harm for his position, but with the added benefit of seeming oh-so-open to opposing viewpoints.

It’s basically like some TV show where everybody always goes on about how smart such-and-such a character is, but who barely acts competently enough to tie their own shoes.

[Starving_Artist]

Methinks Bricker should consider changing his user name to Rorschach.

[Alessan]

@Starving_Artist

Methinks Bricker should consider changing his user name to Rorschach.

We are, in fact, trapped in here with him.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@iiandyiiii

People are always going to be more likely to call out negative things with folks who disagree rather than agree with them. They’re just human. Dopers are great, but we are human, and as susceptible to human failings as any other group. Hopefully we’ll strive to improve ourselves, but we’ll always be human.

I see these sort of complaints all the time, but they’re inevitable with any group that leans in one direction or the other. I try to call out bad behavior when I notice it, but I’m sure I fail or miss it quite often.

You are particularly open to counterarguments. This is a very rare trait among liberals OR conservatives who find themselves in a comfortable supportive echo chamber.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@elucidator

“Hypocrisy is the pretty compliment that vice pays to virtue”
*

• Paraphrase of an aphorism by some French guy who’s name I cannot spell, cannot pronounce and cannot search. *

You haven’t made and defended a position or argument in years. All you have to offer this site is wit, humor, and the occasional astute observation.

[iiandyiiii]

@Damuri_Ajashi

You are particularly open to counterarguments. This is a very rare trait among liberals OR conservatives who find themselves in a comfortable supportive echo chamber.

Thank you; very kind of you to say.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Beren_Erchamion

So you agree that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot weren’t leftists, then? After all, what they were creating were in no way communist societies. The Soviet Union was capitalist as fuck; as for China and Cambodia, I’m not familiar enough with them to have any sense of what you’d call them, or if they were sui generis, but they definitely weren’t communist: they had states and they had social classes, after all.

In what way was the Soviet Union capitalistic as fuck?

The means of production owned by the government rather than private individuals.
There was centralized distribution of output largely determined by need rather than value produced.
The pricing mechanism was usurped by government price fixing which led to shortages and surpluses when they got the pricing wrong.
It was a command economy but so were Japan and Korea and no one thinks they were communist.

The existence of social classes has nothing to do with communism/capitalism.

We used to have feudalism and that definitely had social classes. That doesn’t mean that middle age Europe was a capitalistic society.

[Shodan]

@BigT

He is also an asshole who thinks he’s right all the time and lectures everyone. It’s the same reason people hate me.

Do you understand that you are saying that you are an asshole as much as Bricker is?

Regards,
Shodan

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Beren_Erchamion

It really was.

I mean, fundamentally capitalism is a system of relations of production. And the dominant mode of relations of production in the Soviet Union was employment by someone else, at a time and place chosen by someone else, doing tasks chosen by someone else in a manner devised by someone else, in a physical environment created by someone else, for a wage chosen by someone else that only represented a fraction of the value that one’s labor produced.

In other words, capitalism.

Capitalism, with the state as monopoly capitalist.

WTF! Boggle

State ownership of the means of production is one of the primary characteristics of communism. WTF fuck did you think communism means?

Are you confusing communism and hippie communes?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@elucidator

He didn’t either, he believed he had discovered a force of history, an inevitable and implacable force that existed outside of the metaphysics of morality. It was objective science, a fact rather than an inspiration. That was to be the force of his argument, not that it was just, but that it was inevitable. Its wasn’t good or bad, it was science.

Friend Beren Erchamion has announced himself a Communist, a position that I cannot take seriously on any political spectrum, any more than I can accept predestinarian Calvinism as a legitimate subset of Christianity.

Marx may have been right, just a few centuries early.

We have seen a new phenomenon in recent years. Until very recently, technological advance created more jobs than it destroyed. The cotton gin replaced slave labor in combing cotton and this resulted in the drop in the price of cotton which actually INCREASED the demand for slave labor as the demand for cotton at the new lower prices shot through the roof. See king cotton.

If technology continues to obsolete jobs at a higher rate than it creates jobs, we will see a steadily growing underclass of people whose only means of production (unskilled manual labor) will not be able to command a price that can compete with machines while still providing a living wage. As machines get more sophisticated, low skill labor will join this group. Then semi-skilled labor and so on until there is a communist revolution and we institute a basic income.

We will still need scientists and highly skilled labor but the vast majority of people will spend their time playing WoW and eating food laced with birth control.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Beren_Erchamion

He was certainly personally sympathetic to the workers’ movement, but he justified his social theory on “scientific” grounds. In that regard, of course, he was wrong (we don’t call Marxism the pinnacle of high modernism for nothing)–the justification for communism isn’t “scientific” but moral–it’s simply the implementation of Christ’s call to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

Oh you DO mean hippie commune “communism” rather than actual communism (which is in fact government monopoly on the means of production and the distribution of the output).

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@MaxTheVool

I think that’s an over-simplification. Bricker is very intelligent, generally honest, and refreshingly willing to consider opposing viewpoints and change his mind when convinced. Many of my most satisfying SDMB debates have been with him, and I’ve learned a lot.

That said, he has some fairly irritating characteristics:
(1) He’s FAR too quick to play the let’s-point-out-the-liberal-hypocrisy card, even when it’s a very very tenuous comparison, and not remotely germaine to the main topic under conversation
(2) He has a frequently-observed tendency to skitter back and forth between discussions of what is legal and what is right/good. He could save an awful lot of hamsters by saying “hey, I think was a terrible idea, I wish it hadn’t happened, I deplore, it, but I do think it’s legal because x, y and z” rather than saying “this is totally fine”, or something along those lines. Because people read the second, and some of them (understandably, particularly in a heated conversation about an emotionally fraught topic) assume that he’s saying that he supports what happened, ie, thinks it’s a good idea, is in favor of it, wants it to happen more. And then they attack him for that. And then he gets to smugly point out how much better informed he is about the legality of the situation than they are, when, frequently, they didn’t even care about the legality of the situation. (Which of course doesn’t mean that they don’t think legality matters IN GENERAL, just that at this precise moment, in this precise thread, that’s not what they wish to be discussing.)
He is certainly NOT, however, a pile of shit sculpted into human shape. I find his presence on this board to be a massive overall net positive, and wish we had more of him.

On your second point. I think the main impetus behind this back and forth is the notion that morality is highly subjective and what he considers moral may be entirely different than what you consider moral and when we have these disagreements about morality, our system of government gives us a mechanism for breaking the tie. its called democracy. We vote for representatives and they apply their morality in crafting laws that represent the morality of their constituents.

This doesn’t mean that they can’t get it wrong. We had slavery for fucking centuries. But it provides at least a rebuttable presumption of morality.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@BigT

He pretends to be this decent guy, but he argues evil things. He pretends to adhere to the same morals as we do, but then makes large circumlocutions to allow him to justify things that don’t fit those moral principles. He lets slip his partisan leanings all the time, while pretending not to be partisan. Oh, and the projection is obvious every time he goes after liberal hypocrisy.

He is also an asshole who thinks he’s right all the time and lectures everyone. It’s the same reason people hate me. He refuses to engage as he is, someone who is approaching a hostile audience, and instead of trying to work with us, loves to just poke fun and annoy.

And that’s not even getting started with his religion. He uses that as a refuge all the time, but ignores when conservatism is at odds with his faith. Sure, he can cling to it for abortion to be wrong, but he ignores it when Jesus said to heal the sick and give to the poor.

Instead he makes up contradictory bullshit about how he can believe what the Bible says but then still think that doing the opposite is better for the government.

And then there’s his textualism, which is the same thing as Biblical literalism, which his religion rejects. But he’s all for it when dealing with the law. He even admits he’s being “lawful neutral” when, inhernetly, a Christian must be lawful good.

I’m pretty sure that Christians are supposed to be neutral good.

AFAICT, Jesus had no real opinion on whether a well ordered society or a more free society was a better means of honoring God. He actually seemed to sneer a bit at lawfulness in Pharisees and had some close relationships with hairshirt wearing chaotic good types preaching in the wilderness.

Also, he’s a defense attorney who has argued that he has an obligation to fight for someone he knows is guilty to be declared innocent. This is more of his “lawful neutral” idea, that he prefers legalism to morality. Because of this, he is guilty of any subsequent actions by these people, so he is probably guilty of murder.

As a lawyer, I believe everyone, even the guilty deserve an attorney. As long as the attorney isn’t deceiving the court or allowing the court to be deceived by their client, everyone ought to have an attorney.

It is the only right in the bill of rights that the government will pay for. They won’t buy you a gun, they won’t buy you a newspaper but they will buy you an attorney.

[Morgenstern]

So, if we’re limited to one pile of shit, Bricker doesn’t get my vote. Probably not even in the top 50.

I vote for John Fucking Mace for pantload supreme.

Wait, this is a poll right?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@iiandyiiii

Thank you; very kind of you to say.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this opinion. I think its sad that this can be said of so few people on this board.

[Chimera]

Damuri Ajashi

This message is hidden because Damuri Ajashi is on your ignore list.

Damn boy, you post too much.

[Alessan]

@Damuri_Ajashi

WTF! Boggle

State ownership of the means of production is one of the primary characteristics of communism. WTF fuck did you think communism means?

Are you confusing communism and hippie communes?

I think he believes that the only true communism is the mythological final stage of Marxism, in which the State fades away and all humanity starts to spontaneously work together in perfectly benevolent harmony. Anything less than that is a form of capitalism.

[CandidGamera]

@Morgenstern

So, if we’re limited to one pile of shit, Bricker doesn’t get my vote. Probably not even in the top 50.

I vote for John Fucking Mace for pantload supreme.

Wait, this is a poll right?

See, that’s weird to me, because while I seldom agree with John, I don’t feel like he flouts board rules or denigrates entire classes of people. But hey, if you’ve got a litany of his sins that you want to enumerate in a Pit thread, I’ll read it.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

Bricker has posted in two separate threads his disappointment at those beknighted libruls who called for Comey to get fired earlier, but are now upset that he got fired. Bricker furthermore, without anyone asking, informed us that he’s thought firing Comey was a bad idea all along.

I’m realizing he’s not just hunting for examples of liberal hypocrisy. He’s also fishing for validation for his own self-image of being a Man of Foolish Consistency–er, excuse me, a Man of Consistent Principles. And if we won’t give him that validation, he’ll give it to himself with one hand, while using the other to wag a finger at the rest of us less consistent beings.

The OP here is way overstated, but this is a pretty irritating tendency of Bricker’s.