And winning first place in the “rehashing a sad but totally obvious truth about the human condition” competition, we have…
Some of us suffer from this condition a little more severely than others, or at least are more apt to deny that we suffer from it so severely.
Boy, I see a lot of that going on around here.
You stand in line with your bud, waiting to vote.
You talk.
You vote.
Where’s the convolution?
There was a confrontation between two guys and a gal.
We heard her side.
That’s all we’ve heard.
Requoting your “convoluted” scenario:
You keep ignoring the part about the guys yelling to the rest of the crowd that she was a Bush supporter. How do you make that fit into two guys “quietly” having a conversation? You never did make it fit. You just ignored it. But you took the trouble to use your imagination to think up the above alternative scenario.
Why not just say that you think she was lying, and get it over with? Why bother conjuring an “alternative” scenario where this woman “overhears” and gives them a dirty look? It doesn’t remotely resemble the woman’s original claim, since it leaves out a big chunk (the most important chunk, I think) of what she says happened.
I don’t know why you even bothered with all of that. Just say that you think she’s lying, or that it’s just her word for it so we’ll never know. Or, just say that you don’t want to believe her. Save yourself some time.
yosemite this is so not a surprise. Around here when a Republican tracks shit on the carpet, five threads get started about how filthy GOP members are, websites are linked, and the baying goes on for days.
Yet if you point out that a Democrat has also tracked shit on the carpet, you’ll hear: but it’s organic…yes, he’s right-natural fertilizer…that wasn’t him-those tracks were there before…and every other rationalization known to man.
Just once I’d like to see an immediate and honest admission when your side screws something up. I’d also like to win Powerball. Funny how the odds against both are strikingly similar.
Well, whether someone is “yelling to the rest of the crowd” can be a pretty subjective perception. Sometimes I can be in public with my wife and get carried away with one of my own monologues or observations in what I think is a normal tone of voice. My wife, who can be a little self conscious in public situations will tell me to pipe down and quit “announcing” things, that “people are staring,” etc. Especially when there’s a lot of profanity involved, which is usually the case.
I can see where two guys talking to each other and maybe razzing somebody in front of them might seem like a little high-spirited banter to them but seem like terroristic harassment to a humor-impaired, thin-skinned conservative.
My inlaws are rural, conservative, dittohead, Bush loving Republicans. Whenever I go to visit, I can count on a few cracks about my immoral, communist leanings. But it’s always intended in a very light, good humored way. They are very nice people and their little jabs are never really angry or mean, they’re just intended in the same kind of spirit as smack talk between sports fans. However, if someone didn’t know them, they might think that they meant that stuff more seriously than they do. (Come on, everyone in the crowd was a Kerry voter except for her? I’d love to believe that but I have to say :dubious:).
I don’t know what happened in this case, but I suspect that the woman in question is exaggerating at least a little. These guys probably were razzing her a little but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were trying to intimidate her, or that they realized she was taking it that way.
And anyway, at most, this is just a couple of guys being jerks in a line . It’s not a concerted or organized effort by “Democrats” to disrupt or manipulate the election results.
Having said that, I do find the ballot linked to by Apos to be rather disturbing. It looks like a deliberate attempt to snooker Bush voters (who are at an intellectual disadvantage to begin with) into wasting their votes and I condemn it. I want a fair election and accurate results. I’d rather lose fairly than win by cheating.
Ain’t that the truth.
And just so I make it clear to everybody, I fully believe that there are Republican-dominant boards that are doing exactly the same thing. I don’t think either side is clean of this sort of behavior. It’s just that when you spend time on a board where there are a higher percentage of one side of the spectrum (whichever side it may be) you’ll really see it in full force.
It sort of reminds me of an old job I had. Just sort of. I worked in a small department of less than 10 people. It was during a particularly newsworthy time for a favorite president in our history. Everyone but me in this department loved this president. I had voted for the guy, but didn’t think he walked on water. Many very ugly, “gang mentality” conversations were had, where I was basically shouted down when I cried bullshit to some of these other people’s arguments or reasoning. (Stuff like “Well, he says that it happened this way! What else do you need to hear?” :rolleyes: )
Then we had the busy season and some new employees were hired. The political balance was more even. About 50-50. All of a sudden those employees who gleefully shouted me down and we so nasty with me when I disagreed with them were sulking and saying, “I never like to talk about politics.” Yeah right. When they weren’t in the vast majority—didn’t have a gang of people to back them up, it wasn’t any fun anymore.
Not that I am saying that this is exactly what’s going on here. No, not really. But it just reminds me of that a little.
There is no allegation that the harrasser was a democrat supporter. The heckler from the rear of the queue, sure. But mere opposition to Bush does not equal Democrat. And that is all we have on the men the woman complains of.
You mean like in this thread?
Yes, the SDMB is left-leaning. But it’s NEVER been the case that the vast majority of the SDMB is in some kind of blinded partisan haze of denial. So, yes, in a thread like this one, the ratio of responses being “those guys sound like jerks” to “we only have her word for what happened” to “she’s probably just a stupid shrill old humorless Republican biddy” is somewhat different than if it were a kerry-supporting-women telilng the story with the roles reversed. But there is NOT some absolute lack, or anywhere NEAR it, of left-leaning SDMBers who are willing to criticize “their own”. Shodan’s ranting about the liberal hive mind aside, the vast majority of SDMBers, of all stripes, are reasonable, thinking individuals.
So get off your damn high horse.
(PS: in what way did “my side” screw something up here? As I said in my previous post, if there was officially organized DNC involvement in this, that’s grave and troubling. If it was just some guys being jerks, well, that sucks, but what am I supposed to do, abase myself and say “well, Bush lied about WMDs, but these guys in line in Florida yelled at a woman… so you can see that there’s bad on both sides of the line?”)
See, kids, this is why the Democrats keep getting whupped by the Republicans.
Democrats go to voting places, start grass-roots conversations, and piss off a handful of Republican voters in earshot.
Republicans tear up Democrat voter registration forms, make up bullshit excuses in the courts to disenfranchise Democrat-leaning voters, phone-spam registered Democrats to tell them their voting place has been moved, and keep the CEOs of companies making unsecure electronic voting machines in their back pockets.
Democratic tactics are merely annoying; Republican tactics are downright evil.
There are a lot of SDMBers, and yes, I’d like to think that many of them are fairly reasonable most of the time. But not as many as should be—not by a long shot. Too many people whose opinions I otherwise value are just blowing it big time with this bullshit. It’s shocking to me, frankly. My estimation of way too many people has been lowered Big Time. (Not that any of you should care, exactly, but I’m just sayin’.)
Many of you should not delude yourselves that you’re behaving in a reasonable manner about these issues. Many of you are not. Just because you’ve got a lot of people who agree with you, and just because every third damned thread (exaggeration, but not by much) is a “Republicans are evil/stupid/eat their boogers” thread does not mean that everyone who visits these boards is getting a favorable impression. I think that some of you are losing credibility fast. At least you are with me.
And no, I’m not going to link to threads or name names. (What good would that do? There would be just more denial, more name-calling, more bullshit! I’ve had enough of that already!) Besides, some of the people who have just gone over the top are people I ordinarily like and I am simply hoping that they’ll come to their senses after the election is over. I just want this to be over so everyone stops behaving like assholes.
danceswithcats may have exaggerated a bit for humorous effect, but dammit, there’s definitely some truth in what he (she?) is saying. And it’s been getting on my nerves for quite a while now.
I have several responses to that:
(a) you may think that naming names wouldn’t accomplish anything. And you may be right. But complaining about it WITHOUT naming names accomplishes even less.
(b) I’m not saying that what you’re saying has no basis whatsoever. But I think it’s easy to overlook the number of reasonable responses, and the number of reasonable people who had nothing to add, so didn’t respond at all. How many people in this thread actually are having the stereotypical dumb liberal resopnse, whatever the hell it happens to be?
(c) In particular, if someone starts a thread whose title is “Republicans are all cockholes”, the only people who are going to go post in that thread are either people who believe Republicans are cockholes, or people who want to argue that point. I mean, maybe in some ideal world that thread would be flooded with 1000’s of posts saying “hey, I’m a democrat, and I don’t think most Republicans are cockholes”, (and there usually are a few), but the fact that it isn’t just means that the liberals here are bored and lazy and imperfect, not that they all think that Republicans are cockholes, or that they all think that it’s OK to say that Republicans are cockholes.
(d) Finally, I think it’s valuable to realize that the level of passion and heat in these debates comes, largely, from sincerity and patriotism. If someone didn’t care about America, and didn’t have ideals and opinions and so forth, they wouldn’t get so worked up against Bush (or what have you). Not saying that that reaction is the only one that reasonable people can have, but (for the most part at least), it’s the passion of a truly concerned individual, not the passion of a teenager throwing a hissy fit, although I admit that it often manifests itself in far from ideal ways.
I would name names if I thought it would do any good. But I do not believe that it will. Perhaps someone with more intestinal fortitude will try. But you know what? I’ve already seen some of them try. And it didn’t do any good. I think the only thing that will resolve this will be for the elections to conclude or for the political balance here to become more 50-50. (Not that I am critcizing this board for being more left-leaning. It is what it is. But this current phenomenon is one of the side-effects of an “unbalanced” atmosphere.)
Previously on this thread I gave my account about my old workplace, and the “bully attitude” that existed there for a while. All my coworkers thought that they were nice people. And they thought they were reasonable in the way they behaved. And in a lot of ways, they were nice people—I worked alongside them for several years and I can honestly say that I liked them. But the level of self-delusion was pretty strong in them when it came to politics and they could get nasty. (I remember one woman, in the heat of her argument, even maligned the honor of my deceased father—man, that was low.)
And I’m seeing snippets of that here. Just people getting mean. Various examples of asshole stuff. Not directed at me, per se, but in general. In my past experience, there’s not much fighting against it when you’re in the vast minority. In the case of my old job, the only thing that cured the nastiness was the influx of new people with differing opinions, so that the balance was more 50-50. I don’t see that happening here anytime soon.
Yes, there are reasonable responses. I’ve seen them. But there have been more than a few threads that had too much bullshit, and it mostly went unchallenged. That’s troubling, but not surprising. Does it happen all the time? No, of course not. If it was an absolutely unbearable constant thing I don’t think I could stand participating on this board at all. But it happens more than it should, in my opinion. There are too many “reasonable” people just sitting back and not challenging the bullshit. A few people try (I’ve tried), but it’s so easy to shout down a few people.
Sure, and it works both ways. But there’s still just too much bullshit, even when you factor in these things.
Bless your heart, I know you mean well, but the way my mood is right now I’m not really receptive to the “They’re being flaming assholes because they care” rationale. I mean, I’ve heard it used for a lot of things, and pardon me (because I know you are really trying to be fair-minded about this) but I’ve just had my fill.
I really have been contemplating starting my own Pit thread to vent, but I’m trying to rein myself in because, frankly, I don’t think it will make a dent, and because . . . well, we’ve got too many of these damned threads already! But I might just succumb to temptation—can’t guarantee that I won’t.
“Why do you want to be a big brother Mr. Simpson?”
(Homer’s brain) Don’t say revenge; don’t say revenge…
Homer: “Revenge!”
(Homer’s brain) That’s it, I’m outta here…
Who the hell is Betty Castor?
A Democratic terrorist who’s following Just Some Guy around, waiting to pounce. Or perhaps a Republican agent provocateur? We may never know.
I suppose we can speculate that the man was an ardent Badnarik supporter.
Franklu, I find that unlikely. Libertarians treasure non-coercion.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Oh my God, they are so cute when they are all young and idealistic and shit. Believing that one side has a better grasp than the other on “sincerity” or “patriotism” is ludicrous. It is, for either side, all about power and money, and at the moment, both sides think that the best way to get power and money is through extreme partisanship, negative campaigning and sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming LALALALALA rather than admit that your opponents might occasionally have a valid point.
Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.
Legislate. :rolleyes:
I unequivocally condemn such behavior, and am disappointed that anyone has trouble issuing such a condemnation.
Daniel