Next on Fox: When Rants (and small whines) Attack Their Owners
Just to echo what my esteemed colleague John Corrado has already said:
I moved this thread from Great Debates to the Pit because it isn’t a Great Debate, it’s a complaint about the posting habits of other posters, stemming from another thread in the Pit.
There is certainly no need for me to move threads to the Pit solely in order to allow people to make personal attacks on a poster, as our posters are perfectly capable of starting their own Pit threads for that purpose.
I think it’s kinda funny that TheRyan thinks GD will protect him from his own folly. As if in the posters in GD are sweet-natured yespeople who will nod in agreement with this:
O.K., maybe he would have been saved from being called a fuckwit and insane, but GD’ers can be just as sharp and nasty to the ridiculous as Pitizens. When someone posts a link to a cite in GD it is expected that you will read it, even more so than in the Pit.
My suggestion to you TheRyan is to try again. Reword the question so that it actually contains something to debate. Like Should debaters actually read linked cites? Or What constitutes a cite? But don’t put so much personal whinging in your OP and see if you don’t get your ass handed back to you.
If you do this, please don’t tell MEB it was my idea.
I agree, TheRyan, it is not your job as a debater to defeat your own argument, it is the person critiquing your position. As such, a simple link doesn’t amount to jack shit. I agree, without reservation, with DDG and jshore’s additional perspective.
I think the OP is absolutely right here.
I have nothing to say on the thread that seems to have creeped its way into this one. I have nothing to say about TheRyan’s character in general.
Um, if you refuse to look at countervailing evidence, it doesn’t mean that you still are right. It just means that you are wrong and too ignorant to know it. I, for one, very much prefer to knowing the truth to continuing on in blissful stupidity.
Sua
You lying rat.
Fiirst off, silence speaks volumes in and of itself, and secondly, when you point out that you don’t have anything to say about a topic and make an issue of that fact, that is most assuredly saying something.
So, not only do you have something to say, you said it. The fact that what you said was that you had nothing to say is the problem.
It was true until you said it, once you did it was a lie.
You’ve snared yourself in a Catch-22 of your devising.
Hmmm…so true, Scylla, now if only we can figure out what volumes my silence speaks…
I rarely agree with anything The Ryan says when in fact I can even tell what he’s trying to say. I’ve taken to skipping over his obtuse line-by-line dissections of posts and avoiding discussions in which he has a substantial part. I don’t know the history of the evolution of this thread - it seems posting it in GD was a bad move. And I have no wish to read the thread that prompted this discussion of what is and is not a cite, since it promises to be a morass of classic The Ryan semantics.
HOWEVER, in an attempt to separate personal feelings about posters from evaluations of posts:
I mostly agree with the OP. When linking to material on a web page, it would be wonderful if posters briefly quoted revelant passages. Especially when the linked material is long, and the relevant points buried, a few quotes from you can help me know what to look for and how to evaluate the material.
Furthermore, throwing a link into a discussion doesn’t mean you’ve made your point - it’s like turning in just the footnotes and the bibliography instead of the term paper. Whether this can or should be standard board practice isn’t for me to decide, but personally I’ll try to do this from now on in GD and GQ.
I think what you guys keep missing is that WE DID DO ALL THAT, and our dear, beloved The Ryan is LYING TO YOU about it.
Scroll up and read my first reply in this thread. CLICK THAT LINK and tell me if you don’t think my quoted and linked reply qualifies for exactly what you and The Ryan have described.
THEN, come back and tell me why the FUCK The Ryan said on PAGE 4 that he didn’t get any proper links with quotes.
JEEZ.
Oh, and my taxi’s here to take me to the airport so I definitely won’t see this thread again until sometime tomorrow, so don’t expect any replies until then (and possibly not at all if we get too busy).
Have a nice night.
Ah, that makes more sense then. If reading the thread would involve encountering many The Ryan posts, then I respectfully bow out of further discussions.
When I clicked on that link, I was taken to the second page in the thread. Could you tell me what posts specifically you are talking about?
Are you psychiatrists? What makes your opinion more important than mine and the dictionary’s?
If you present me with a specific statement, I will consider whether or not I should retract it. Simply asking “retraction?” isn’t going to get you anything.
I never, not once ever said that male-male molestation is always committed by homosexuals. If you can find a quote from me saying that, I swear that I will change my signature to read “I am an idiot” and include a link to that thread, and do my best to remember to include my sig in every post of mine in the next month.
I linked you to the fucking god damn page and quoted your own fucking words. to demand that I do anymotherfuckingthing additional to help you fucking find your own fucking words is fucking absurd.
fuck.
John Corrado:
A debate takes at least two people. Unless you’re encoraging me to break the rule about sock puppets, there’s no way I can start a debate. Also, my OP was confined entirely to the practice of posting just links. No statements about specific posters, or even posters in general, was made.
I didn’t ask whether you prefer thinking that you’re right to knowing that you’re wrong. I asked whether you prefer being right to being wrong.
Shayna
So could you do magnalene a favor and give her an exact quote of the statement of mine which you disproved, and an explanation of how you disproved it? You know, so she doesn’t have to read through the thread and all.
You said that I took dictionary.com’s definition over psychiatrists’. That involves three claims: one, that I referred to dictionary.com; two, that psychiatirsts’ definitions were presented; and three, that I stated that I considered dictionary.com’s definition to be more compelling. You have established one third of those claims. Are you going to bother with the other two thirds?
And I notice that you seem to be ignoring an opportunity to make me declare my idiocy to the world. Could that possibly be because you’ve made a mistake?
Somebody kick the record player - it’s skipping!
Esprix
DNFTT!
Shayna
Well, congratulations. It actually me a while to realize how absurd this statement is. You did not all do that, and I never claimed that no one was doing it. It was Homebrew, not me, that possted a link to that thread. I was talking about behavior in the SDMB in general. So what exactly am I lying about? That some people (no, not everyone, but some people) post just a link and have no quote or summary? Are you really disputing that? I would like an exact quote of this “lie” of mine.
And Scylla, I’m curious what thread you’re talking about.
I can be a bit slow at times, so maybe I’m wrong here, but did The Ryan just ask for a cite that he ignores cites?
The irony in here is so thick you could stick a magnet to it.
This is the most idiotic reasoning I’ve ever seen. Using your hair-brained Bizzaro-land version of “logic”, the entirety of Great Debates should be impossible. Yet it has existed - quite well - for a couple years now.
Either 20,000 other Dopers are wrong, Ryan, or you are. I wonder which it is…