Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians - the omnibus thread

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@Steophan

There’s a lot of people in this thread being dishonest, mainly those who claim that they aren’t anti-police but want to give the cops less protection than other people.

@Frylock

Yeah no. That’s not true. You are not telling the truth about what you yourself are saying. You were speaking about whether to accept testimony as true. In other words, you were talking about “what X says” for a certain X.

Look man, it took you a bit of time to come up with that response, so I know you spent some time going back and forth between my quotations of what you said and what I said you said. In your brain was this slow dawning realization that you had fucked up. I know how this goes. It has happened to me on several occasions in the past. But then you quashed that realization, instead pouncing on a point of phrasing in order to be able save face by pretending the particular phrasing had any real implications for the substantive point. This is definitely a dishonest thing to do. But again, I’ve been there as well. I know how this goes, and I know that, in a certain state of mind, it doesn’t feel dishonest.

Over time I got to develop an instinct for knowing when I was bullshitting myself. Nobody can do this perfectly, but with careful attention you can learn to see it for yourself. I wish you good luck in the future on this point.

I just saw this reply from Frylock to Steophan from a different thread, in Great Debates, which felt very familiar. I think Frylock’s post is much more insightful and well thought out than anything I would write. It’s just so perfectly applicable to Steophan in this thread as well.

Steophan, the “you’re a lying liar who is distorting my words and you need to read better” gambit only works if you don’t say it to EVERYONE you are talking to. When you do it your way, you make it too obvious that you’re the fuck-up who cannot even switch up his schtick to give a false veneer of believability.