Can we get on the same page, please?

The BBQ Pit
1

Ok, so maybe the word “please” isn’t a norm for this forum. I won’t post any links in this 'cause I don’t want to aim this at any specific poster, but…

In order to frame a debate, it is helpful if we refrain from setting up the ‘other sides’ position as an absurdity.

Such as “aren’t cats better than idiotic slobbering, germ ridden dogs?” or “How could anyone possibly be taken in by this pathetic excuse of a (fill in the name of your most hated politician)?”

Such as, well, any of a half dozen or so threads currently in operation.

It diminishes your own argument when you paint the oppositions poisition unfairly. And, frankly, you don’t get any better at debating if all you do is preach to the choir.

It is only through intellectually honest point by counterpoint that one is able hone one’s own position, facing legitimate challenges.

Debates can be fun, intellecutally challenging etc. If, however, you’re aiming for a rant against something/somebody you don’t like, may I be the first to offer up the option of taking your ill concieved, poorly constructed strawman of an argument and head to you nearest Favorite Cause Message Board?

(sorry, I don’t really do rants well)

2

[sulkily packs up ill-conceived, poorly constructed strawman and heads over to the FCMB to preach to the choir, dribbling a pathetic trail of little bits of straw all the way over there]

[sub]hadn’t oughta make fun of my strawman, took me a long time to construct him…[/sub]

Hey, this would be more fun for the rest of us with a link, ya know…or maybe some initials…? Date of registration? Little word, two syllables, sounds like…?

3

[sub] Nice straw man you’ve got there, Duck, got any spares? [/sub]

I’m not really aiming this at any one specific poster, tho. It seems to me lately, that I’ve opened up a bunch of GD threads only the read the OP feel like I should post much of what I said in the OP. The most recent were one that asked if Bush worse than Hitler & the one attempting to connect gun control with governmental handouts of syringes ? Close enough?

Those weren’t the only ones, but the most recent that I pulled up.

4

Thank you, thank you, thank you. A thousand thank you’s wring. You know I’m in total agreement with you if you’ve seen my comments in just the two threads you cite here.

5

Thanks wring.

If you start a debate, assume the other side might have some valid points to make, and listen to them instead of denigrating them from the start. Heh. What a revolutionary idea.

May I make some additional suggestions? Just because someone has one position on one issue doesn’t mean that you can assume how they feel about all issues. There are people all over the political spectrum here who pick and choose the issues that are important to them. Watch where you stick those labels.

Second, the Hitler thing is so overused. Here is a little quiz you should take before comparing someone unfavorably to Hitler:

  1. Did he/she set in motion the systematic execution of at least 12 million people, largely based on crackpot theories of a master race or an ideology found in a book? If “yes,” proceed to the next question. If “no”, stop. This person is not “worse than Hitler.”

  2. Did this person rise to power through democratic means and immediately go about forming a police state and an autarkic economic system? If yes, proceed to next question. If “no”, this person is not worse than Hitler.

  3. Did this person attempt to take over an entire continent by force? If yes, see below. If no, stop. This person is not worse than Hitler.

If the answer to all these three questions is “yes”, then you are allowed to compare the individual to Hitler, and make an argument for them being even worse. Josef Stalin and Pol Pot are excellent candidates for this. If no, then please give this analogy a rest.

::thud:: [sub]Hey! Where are you taking my soapbox! You can’t do this to me! Are you some kind of Hitler?[/sub]

6

I’m sorry, wring, you just don’t get it. The name of the forum is Great Debates.

To many, a truly great debate is where they initially post a one-sided statement, and the rest of the board gathers around and says how correct, intelligent, wonderful and good looking the OP is. Once someone else comes in and starts refuting the OP’s statements with facts and logical argument, it falls from being a great debate to a rather humdrum and ordinary debate.

It’s folks like you, wring, who actually have reasonable and fact-based positions rather than than knee-jerk prejudices that take the shine of greatness off those debates. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

7

:: hangs head in shame:: I stand corrected Bildo, and I say this, as FOG is my witness, I will now let my knees jerk as they will without restraint! let there be a kettle/pot reference in every post!

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wring is my new hero.

I preach about intellectual honesty all the time. It’s necessary, if you’re trying to form intelligent, thought-out positions on any topics, to have the ability to stand back and look at the subject dispassionately.

But I don’t think most people do.

So I’m building a statue to wring in my backyard. But I’m having trouble convincing the county council to allow me to blast Short Hill Mountain. They don’t seem to be buying into my ‘new Rushmore’ concept here.

9

Awwww, all right.

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wring, I haven’t often responded to your threads or posts, not out of disinterest but instead because you made the point I would’ve made, and I’m not much of a me too-er.
But for this thread, I have to add a ME TOO!

Thanks, darlin’

Sua

11

I’m flattered. :smiley:

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How about this for a Great Debate:

Resolved: wring is the weakest link, goodbye!!:wink:

But seriously, are these the types of resolutions you are talking about, wring? I think that it is not a problem in itself if they manage to support the pro side of an outrageous statement such as the one above, although even I will have a hard time supporting the above. But then I find that, when pressed for clarity and evidence, the original debators resort to re-stating the resolution as if it alone is the proof they need to win the argument. I would agree that that aspect most often tend to at least disappoint a would-be debator.

13

Gee, I missed this thread on its first pass.

So I open up the thread and as soon as I read the OP I start thinking, “John John’s back already?”

14

Well said. That is one of my pet peeves. Recently on a different board someone compared a guy to a Nazi for forming a new board that was viewed as competing with his board. My brother-in-law acccused the civil servant who came to his door to demand that he gasp license his dog of using “Gestapo tactics.” Apples and oranges, morons!

Those of you old time net heads should be familiar with the brilliantly posed Godwin’s Law of the Usenet. “Any argument that goes on for long enough will eventually end up with one party comparing the other party’s position to the Nazis. The person who makes that comparison has the weaker argument and automatically loses.”

Haj

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While I’m sort of a rookie here, it seems to me that the place to take a rational approach is the Great Debates board. The rule here seems to be: anyone who disagrees with me is either a villain or a fool, and is probably a lying son of a bitch to boot.

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Spavined I’m not sure what you’re saying - the point of my OP was that in GD, it’s better to start off your topic either by positing **your **position in clear terms or by setting up the framework but by assuming that there is merit possible on both sides.

We don’t generally debate things like “serial killers bad or merely low impulse control?”. We may feel strongly that our own personal viewpoint on politics, religion, abortion, education, crime, etc is the best one, but you see, even the people on the other side believe that same thing.

So, while I may (to pick one) feel that abortion is an intensely personal decision and that the only ones that can and should properly make the moral decsion about the appropriateness of abortion in individual situations are those that it directly effects individually, I also understand that those who hold a different opinion have their own perceptions to back them up.

My concern was that, it seemed for a while (and sigh, it’s happening again) that some people would pick a position, and posite the framework for their argument in such a way as to paint an unfair assessment of the oppositions position. So, instead of being able to have a healthy, interesting debate on the underlying principal, we end up with pages and pages of “well, we don’t believe that, we believe this” and microscopic analysis of semantics.

See, I enjoyed the old Saturday Night Live Point Counter Points things with Jane Curtain and Danny Ackroyd, where Jane would present a position in several statements, then turn to Ackroyd who would immediately counter with “Jane, you ignorant slut”. It was funny. But it’s also not what I’m searching for here when I go to GD.

tom well, John John doesn’t seem to be back in person, but definately in spirit. (though I did enjoy the “Score!” aspect to his - why not have a hockey type reference in the bloodbaths that he sponsored?)

Haj You bet we like Godwin’s law here. I’m thinking of nominating as a second kind of ‘overdone’ thing the “I felt like I’d been raped” by anyone who hadn’t been actually raped. Rape victims personally don’t usually use that term when dealing with, oh, say, their car being broken into for example.

** capacitor** I don’t mind if some one starts a thread merely with their own position, as long as it’s not a simple demonizing of the opposition. For example, if I, as a liberal, started a thread with “I feel that it’s the responsability of society to insure that even the most lowly of our members have their basic needs met”, that’s one thing. But, if instead I start it out as “naturally, those me-first, everybody else be damned conservatives don’t give a shit about anyone else, so they’re obviously self indulgent miscreants”, well, that’s not going to start anywhere good, eh?

17

wring:

I’m guilty of what you say. In fact, I’m one of the worst. I appreciate the edification. It was a real eye opener.

Here’s how I see it. In political debates, I cast anything that is nonlibertarian as a blanket philosophy whose core principle is to deny rights. Heretofore, I’ve been able to see when it was done to me. People who put up anarchy, for example, and argue against it to make a point about libertarianism. But I haven’t, until now, … strike that. I’m pretty sure I have seen myself do it; I’ve just never let myself admit it. Even now, there is an ongoing debate (in the Pit, of all places) with Olentzero about socialism, where I’m casting his philosophy in the worst possible light I can. Yes, I even evoked Hitler. Now, I could cite Magdelene and justify what I did since it was Stalin that I compared Hitler to. But that would be fudging because I don’t think Olentzero is defending Stalinism.

So, you see, I set up Stalinism and argued against it. Intellectually dishonest and, like you say, not even a fun debate. Too easy.

Likewise, in epistemological debates, I cast anything that is not objectivism as a worthless source of knowledge. I’m fond of making the point that you really can’t prove anything, even your own existence. But in fact I’m not winning any debate in doing that; I’m merely destroying one. See, if your epistemology is insufficient because they all are, then so is mine! I turn the debate into shadow boxing.

And finally, in metaphysical debates, I cast anything that is not spiritual as unreal. In truth, I believe that the material universe is not essentially real, but that isn’t what I say. I say it isn’t real, period. What I ought to say is that the material universe is real on one level, but that there is a greater (i.e., more essential) reality. Had I done that to start with, I wouldn’t have had to explain anything to Manhattan. For purposes of clarity in debate, I ought not to say that the atoms are not real; I ought to say that they are not morally significant. They serve merely as a context in which we act out our morality, but they are amoral; they are merely waves collapsing.

Anyway, thanks for the much needed conviction. I just wanted you to know that in dropping your seed out there, at least one of them took root and hopefully will grow.

18

Libertarian I’m really quite touched.

It takes quite a bit to admit when you’ve played the easy way (ie argued against the extermist position of your oponent’s arguments - after all, Pat Robertson, for example, makes such a lovely target)

The SDMB has afforded me the pleasant opportunity to debate and argue points and counter points, something I haven’t been able to do since college. And, I think I’m some what typical- we surround ourselves with folks we like, who, surprisingly enough, often are like ourselves. So, this has been a good opportunity for me to hone my arguments, marshall my thoughts together and be able to defend my position, against persons who just as strongly believe their point.

Look forward to doing the same with you… (tho’ I dont’ tend to stray into the economics debates - I managed to get through an entire BA degree w/o taking econ)

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wring:

Well, ya know, Hitler also surrounded himself with people he liked… :smiley: See you in GD!

20

A corrolary to wring’s excellent post:

Suggesting that an issue is not as simple as someone portrays it does not equal support of the other side’s opinion.

I see things like this alot:

Poster1: People who club baby seals are all little Hitlers.

Poster2: While I am no proponent of fur of any type, let alone baby seal fur, I think that from the baby seal clubber’s perspective this is just a job, they do it as quickly and humanely as possible, and to them animal life just isn’t sacred. This is a far cry from Hitler, who certainly grew up in a socity that considered genocide wrong.

Poster1: Spare me your sick rationalizations of why you can wear that fur wrap. I don’t have time for them.

Another version of the same sort of thing:

Poster1: Here is a link to a 2 paragraph news story about XYZ. Can you believe XYZ? I am so mad about XYZ I could spit. I can hardly believe it is true.

Poster2: Perhaps we don’t have all the facts. This is a very brief story, and there may be details we are missing which would make this make sense.

Poster1: What possible, possible justification of XYZ could there be? How could there be any circumstances that XYZ is just? I can’t believe you would defend XYZ!
This sort of thing make people hesitant to point out flaws in an arguement whose overall conclusions they actually agree with. And learning the flaws in arguements for posistions you agree with is a critical part of fighting ignorance–no point in handing your opponents an arguement they can tear apart.