So what exactly was it that you did, shit for brains?
a) Played a joke
b) Made an inadvertent mistake
c) Performed an experiment
d) Lied through your ass
e) Lied through your ass and got caught
f) Lied through your ass, got caught, then started telling different lies to justify it?
Pick one, and stick with it. Weasel.
My money’s on (f).
If the point was to make a point about liberals branding an assertion of fact by Bush as a lie, while accepting the same sort of statement from Clinton as fact, the appropriate structure would have been:
“On ***** date, Bill Clinton said this – ********* – and this – ********* – about Saddam Hussein and WMD. Hillary Clinton on this date **** said this – ******** – too. I didn’t see any of you liberals objecting. But when Bush says this – ******** – about the same subject, making the same points, you call him a liar. How can you justify that? Aren’t you being hypocritical?”
Now, that would be a valid invitation to debate, with all the cards on the table. What was done here was intellectually dishonest and makes no valid point that I can see. All of december’s attempts to rationalize what was done simply confirm me in that opinion.
Desmostylus
You’re ignoreing the oh so slightly pertinent fact that Collounsbury, fount of useful MENA info that he was, was quite possibly the nastiest piece of work ever to grace these boards. Had you, I or December or pretty much anyone else demonstrated the sort of behaviour he did as frequently as him we probably would have been been banned within days.
Collounsbury’s banning was way overdue and this is at least in part due to the fact that this board is run by people who share his views, namely atheist liberals.
Idiot.
HAW HAW HAW.
Yes I’m “ignoreing” that altogether.
You probably don’t know what “non sequitur” means, either.
Interesting. You referred to him as “The President”. Can you explain to me what X is in this instance?
Twistoffate
Stellar rebuttal, shithead. You must read a lot of Wilde.
Desmostylus
I know damn well what a non sequitur is but your conclusion was that this board is not run by atheist liberals and you offer as evidence the fact that Collounsbury, prominent atheist liberal, was banned. You are ignorEing the fact that his posting style was such that his banning was long overdue. I posit that he was allowed such a relatively free rein because the administrators shared his perspective.***
Thus, while Lib’s conclusion isn’t supported by Collounsbury’s banning, it IS supported by the fact that the administration took so long to ban him.
Clear?
***Statements like this are very difficult to word without giving the appearance that the author is not delivering some sort of slight. I want to clarify my comments by saying that the moderators and administrators of this site are remarkably good at what they do and are the single largest reason this board functions as well as it does. Personally I consider the way Collounsbury was dealt with (or wasn’t dealt with) to be a single anomaly in an otherwise superb track record.
I thought your post was a parody at first and had a good laugh, then I had the chilling thought that you might be stupid enough to believe this tripe. Please tell me this is a semi-whoosh and you are not this out of touch with reality.
It was a serious post and since you do not get to define reality your post does not count as a rebuttal.
Hicks, if the only reason you can come up with for Collounsbury’s not being banned for so long is that he was an “atheist liberal,” then your perception of your own logic is highly overrated.
Same goes for you, Libertarian. Go back and reread those threads in which the admins discussed C’s banning, reinstatement, and rebanning. And come down from the fucking cross – or if that’s blasphemous, unstrap yourself from the fucking electric chair. Y’all are not poor martyrs being oppressed by the evil atheists, as much as you’d like to be.
Daniel
Care to elaborate? I know the reason the mods gave for not restraining him was that he never technically broke the don’t be a jerk rule because he never technically insulted the poster. However, I know I’m not the only one who finds statements like “How does your conscience allow you to employ such idiotic logic” just as offensive as “You’re an idiot”. He didn’t insult the poster by the standards the mods used but by most people’s standards he was being an asshole. A quick search on his name will reveal thread after thread of evidence.
And I don’t think he could have been kept on for as long as he did purely for his MENA knowledge either because we have several posters who are extremely knowledgeable about the middle east (and in the case of Tamerlane someone who seems far more knowledgeable) and who are a thousand times more polite. In other words, we didn’t need him so we didn’t need to tolerate his rude, abraisive personality.
So what else could it have been? I’m not suggesting that the mods viewed Collounsbury as “Another atheist liberal to add to our ranks in our fight against the vast right wing conspiracy” and treated him with kid gloves for that reason. I just think that the general consensus among them was that so long as he was kicking the right people’s teeth in it was OK to let him pull the shit that he did. The right people on this board, as far as I can ascertain, are predominently conservative with a couple of liberals (Reeder, for example) thrown in for good measure and to deflect accusations of bias.
Oh, and while the comparison of Franken and December is intersting, I have a question:
Does the USPS have rules against using the mail to perform pranks?
Does the SDMB have rules against using the boards to perform pranks?
My understanding is that Franken was performing his prank in an appropriate venue; December was not. Further, Franken wasn’t (in this insteance) trolling, whereas Decmeber was.
Not that trolling is inherently bad – and I’m sure Franken has trolled before, and I’ve found trols on other boards to be funny sometimes. The fact that December’s latest troll was poorly executed and doesn’t make the point he wants to make is irrelevant, however – the point is that, near as I can tell, it WAS a troll, and December knows that’s not allowed.
I don’t know that he should be banned for this, but I’d love to see an official warning, with the understanding that, the next time he deliberately posts a misleading OP in order to stir up trouble, the banstick might come down.
Daniel
**
You answered your own question. He was careful for a long time not to insult people by the standards the mods used. Yes, he was insulting – but the mods were loathe to change the rules just for the sake of banning him. Eventually, however, in recognition of the fact that he was obeying the letter and not the spirit of the no-insult rules, they decided to follow the spirit and not the letter themselves, and they banned him. (Note that I support this decision – I’m much more a “spirit of the rules” guy myself)
It’s nice to have more than one expert on a field. And C’s expertise was in a slightly different area than Tamerlane’s, as I’m sure Tamerlane would be glad to admit.
Personally, if I rejected the above two reasons, I’d be likely to believe the mods left him alone because they loved his drunken 1920’s-style expat persona and writing style. Why on earth would you conclude that they left him alone because he was an atheist liberal, unless you were pining away for the days of being fed to the lions?
I’ve known for awhile that Libertarian had a huge, martyr-shaped blind spot in his world-view; I didn’t realize you did, too.
Daniel
Gary Kumquat, before it’s lost in the noise . . .
You are absolutely correct.
Former US presidents are appropriately called “Mr. Carter,” or “President Johnson.” In press they’re often referred to as “Former President Reagan.”
They are never, never, never called “The President.”
Now, december knows this very well, and has tried to twist this point. But you are 100% correct.
Nor do you get much traction with your “cause I said so” method of citation and impressive mind-reading abilities towards motives different from those repeatedly posted by the administration for that incident. But I will let them rebut your claims about their motives as it is not my place to speak for the Admins and Mods here.
But thanks for clarifying whether you were a serious poster or just another foaming mouthed ranter disconnected from reality.
Looks like we’re down to arguing what the meaning of “the” is. As [the current President] Bush would say: How ironicalistic.
Words are important. If I said, “I’m going to go speak with Madam Bovary,” you’d have a different impression of my intentions than if I said, “I’m going to go speak with the madam.”
“The” is an article denoting specificity: when used to apply to a singular noun, it implies that there is only one of those things that might be referred to. “I chose to talk to the child” is a useless sentence if the preceding sentence was, “I was confronted by three people: an older woman, a little boy, and a little girl.” It is not meaningless if the previous sentence was, “I was confronted by three people: a man, a woman, and a little boy.”
Still not convinced that “the” is a crucial word? Change the article in the OP: Did a President mislead about Saddam’s WMDs, nukes and terrorists? doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?
December lied, and he did it in order to tweak other posters. That’s trolling, as far as I can tell. If he wants to troll by postal service, that’s fine – but it breaks the rules around these parts.
Daniel
What do you think of this post? I consider this one of the classic SDMB posts, because it dramatically illustrated the differing reactions to an attack on Christians as compared to an identically worded attack on gays. Still, the post expressed a position that the poster did not hold, as a test. (one poster - trying to recover from having been taken in - called it trolling. I would differ).
[sub]FTR: the above comment does not relate to SDMB rules or administrative actions. I am referring to what is or is not a valid debating technique.[/sub]
Yes I would still consider it polite. The fact that you have unrelated objections to something does not make it impolite. You can be a mass murderer and still be polite.
lying to people is polite? deliberatly misleading people is polite?
Not trolling? The poster himself all but admitted it was trolling
What do you think “trolling” refers to, monsters under the bridge?
That said, differences:
Yes, Freedom was trolling by his own admission. However, had he not been trolling – had he been up-front with everyone about his parody – he still would have had a point. December was depending on a lie in order to raise people’s ire and tweak them.
I think Freedom’s trolling was pretty mild; December’s trolling seems to me to be exactly the reason that this board forbids trolling.
Daniel