My browser has learned to automatically navigate to Webster’s Dictionary any time a word longer than two syllables opens on a page. I’ll try not to whine just for you Sparky. I do think some people like to whip out their vocabulary and wave it around a little unnecessarily, lest we didn’t notice the intelligence bursting through the message of the post.
coughschadenfreudecough
I have rarely seen pickles 6 inches long, if ever. More like 4 inches. I think you should look at a ruler rather than some guy’s assertion as to what is six inches. 
Dammit, grienspace! My wife reads the boards!
Well, since this is the pit, and since I seem to be the prime recipient of Collounsbury’s pugnacity as of late, let me be a little more clear:
Collounsbury isn’t “ascerbic”, he’s rude. He’s the type of person who delights in not just beating his adversaries, but in also personally insulting them along the way. It may be fun to watch from the sidelines, but quite frankly when you’ve come home from a long day at work to enjoy a half hour chatting about interesting stuff, it’s not amusing to have to sift through relentless personal insults and jabs just to carry on a conversation. It makes something that is supposed to be enjoyable tedious and unpleasant.
Maybe I’ve just been doing this a lot longer than most of you or something, but my tolerance for internet bullies is just about zero these days.
I’ve noticed that Anthracite posted a note in an energy thread tonight which said that she was going to join the conversation expect that she was getting tired of the snide tones and personal attacks. Well, that’s one thread that is going to be about 1/10 as valuable as it would be if she were participating in it.
There’s nothing special about the internet that makes being a prick any more acceptable than being one in person.
I should add that the overall tone of the SDMB seems to have taken a turn for the worse as of late. And I think it’s precisely because respected, intelligent posters like Collounsbury do it and set the tone for the rest.
Well Sam since we are in the pit let me express myself.
Don’t be a motherfucking whiny little bitch any more than you have to be. I am a prick, true, an objective fact. I also put my motherfucking money where my motherfucking mouth is.
Now, you don’t like it when I characterize your fucking sources as ‘neocon comic books’ – well tough, learn to depend on more rigorous analysis. Do I need to count the number of times you’ve posted bullshit in re the Middle East which I have taken apart? And I do suggest if one looks back at my motherfucking analyses, they’re held water. In fact, they’re motherfucking carried the water from the well to the goddamned farm.
Now, I do regret when my temper takes me too far, and I try to put bounds on this, but when I see the same crap over and over again, I get annoyed. Indeed I get very annoyed.
Bullmotherfucking shiet. Her own intervention was a nonsensical jibe at Jshore, neither logical in re the statement (science, balance: it ain’t fucking spocking, its argumentation, often heated if anyone has ever followed actual exchanges. Data is the driver) nor in re the refutation – indeed it was a classic actual ad hominem as it did not address Jshore’s argument.
So cry me a motherfucking river, poor old Sam. And Una also. If she wanted to critique me, fine, I’d be guilty, jshore was not. At best it was a sharp tone.
And Sam, December was defended by 2 out of 3 posters, only Elvis wanted him banned. However his bullshit style of argumentation has been roundly lambasted with good reason.
Oh yeah, man, you just tear me apart. I am helpless before your amazing command of every subject known to man.
Kiss my ass. The fact is, I quit a lot of discussions we have because I just get fucking TIRED of it. I am perfectly willing to concede a point, and admit when I’m wrong. But what happens far more often is that you’ll come back with some retort like, “If you’d get your head out of your ass and stop spouting fairy tales, you’d see just how weak your position is.” Which is a refutation of exactly nothing. This is usually following by a gang-piling by the second-string sycophants like rjung and ElvisL1ves, who chime in with things like, “Well, Collounsbury tore you a new one, so now we don’t have to.” In the meantime, five other posters have jumped in with their own opinions, and I find myself having to write a fucking essay just to cover half of the responses.
It wasn’t so bad a while ago when there were a number of other conservative posters who could help hold the fort. But most of them have stopped posting. UncleBeer, Milossarian, Anthracite, Manhattan, Scylla… Good posters, with good arguments. You almost never hear from them any more. I have no idea why, but my guess is that they also got tired of it.
It’s very difficult to maintain a conversation with a nasty person when you find it distasteful to respond in kind. It leaves you at a disadvantage. You have to let so many things go, and after a while people take your silence for an admission of failure.
And of course, when you complain about the people who haven’t learned how to keep their tempers in check, you get accused of being a crybaby. That’s what bullies did in the schoolyard, and that’s what they do on the SDMB.
And by the way, I’m not a ‘whiny little bitch’. I’ve been on the SDMB for YEARS, and have posted over 4000 messages to this board, without saying a word about this shit. But the fact is, Great Debates is turning into an ad-hominem shithole, and it’s the fault of people like you. And it’s doubly bad in your case because you ARE an intelligent, educated person. That means that other people follow your lead. It also means you should know better.
Thankyou Sam
I’m sorry Sam, however in all fairness I have seen you “asking for it” more than once. Collounsbury is not one to slap wrists without explaining why, nor would that be allowed on these boards ex-Pit. I could understand your complaints if all C did was spout the kinds of insults you are talking about, but he doesn’t. He always supports his position and he is able to demolish many arguments without his trademark acerbity (I’m trying to say that he doesn’t necessarily depend on acerbity in a debate, it seems to be more decorative than anything else).
I just don’t see him throwing personal attacks around the way some other posters do. And his personal attacks, when they occur, tend to be somewhat less than direct and are usually related to the issue, meaning that the rest of us turn a blind eye to a practice that in most other posters would lead nowhere. With C-boy it seems to work.
Most of the time, that is. A few times his acerbic manner does make him look silly rather than interesting.
Now, the reason why you may find yourself facing an irate Collounsbury every now and then is that your post may not be as well thought out as you think, and may indeed be quite offensive to others. Like C, I tend to get irritated when posters mischaracterize large groups of people. I was able to remember vaguely an incident in which something you said really irritated me, and a quick search located the culprit thread. I think it may be advisable to consider how others could have found your comments below both insulting and frustrating:
I addressed that statement in the thread linked. Be aware that saying things like that will irritate the informed, and you will be challenged accordingly. If it looks like you are just badmouthing, then you will probably be treated as such. After all, you did not have the common decency to consider the situation properly before making your damning, unsupported, generalizing, and ethnocentric statement, so why should others bother putting shock-absorbers on their scorn towards your perceived attitude?
Speaking as someone who struggles (and sometimes fails) to remain patient at times, I can sympathize with Collounsbury’s outbursts. Reading certain assertions can be truly irritating, and reserves of patience are never without limits. Speaking as someone who has inadvertently posted stupidities or inaccuracies every now and then, I can understand how you may find C’s manner of correction unpleasant.
Collounsbury does occasionally make an ass of himself with his vitriol. Nor do I want to give you the impression that I always agree with him, although when it comes to politics he certainly knows his business. His manner can be irritating too, but his heart is usually in the right place (fighting ignorance). One of the first times I had a discussion with C (I think) he was blasting me for having claimed that Greenspan and the Fed had overshot the mark with their interest hikes during the final months of the IT Bubble, and had encouraged a swing from “exuberance” to “depression” that would have occurred anyway, only perhaps not quite as severely. Well, I gave up on that discussion with sentiments (probably) similar to those you expressed in your last post. But I can still appreciate the many contributions to knowledge that Collounsbury has made on these boards, because they are quite sizeable.
I do find it worrying though that some other posters of markedly lesser intelligence occasionally imitate his acerbic style. They don’t last long however, and when they do it is normally on the strength of their rudeness rather than their arguments, which is not the case with C. Now those people are really lame.
I mention this simply in the interest of fighting ignorance with tooth and claw.
So let’s see if I have this straight… Because, in your opinion, some of my opinions are not as well thought out as they could be, it is perfectly acceptable for Collounsbury to personally attack me, because he’s so smart and clever?
A poorly formed post, in your opinion, is tantamount to ‘asking for’ personal abuse? At least, so long as it’s done by really smart people and not the stupid ones who aren’t as clever in the way they make people feel bad?
Interesting theory.
And quite frankly, I think the reason why so many people think that Collounsbury wins many of these arguments is because you share the same viewpoint. The fragment of mine you quoted may be right or wrong, but it’s at least a debatable point of view, considering the economic and cultural performance of the Arab world, especially as compared to Israel.
“Best minds on the planet?” Whose butt are you blowing smoke up? Stephen Hawking and his buddies never post here. While some of the posters are fairly intelligent, I doubt anyone but our fictional hero would claim to be a smartest mind on the planet. ('Cept Fenris, whose said more or less that about himself.) I hereby renouce all claim to being among the smartest minds on the planet. I’d much rather be good looking. 
Anyway, I think I’ve said all that needs to be said. Believe it or not, I enjoy Collounsbury’s posts when he’s being civil. And you’re right - there are plenty of worse offenders around, including some long-term posters. So I’d like to formally offer at this point to get off of Collounsbury’s back and return to just debating the issues.
Hopefully, the points I’ve made here will stay in the back of everyone’s mind the next time they feel like lashing out at someone in frustration. And that includes me.
Again, I explore this issue not to single out anyone or defend Collounsbury, but because I think there are important points to be mined.
This is a relevant point. A poorly informed assertive and offensive post deserves scorn, although ideally a refutation will speak for itself. It’s just that A) no one has infinite patience, and B) hopefully a poster who gets criticized harshly for posting crap will know better next time the topic comes up. Posting nonsense (particularly inflammatory nonsense) is a contribution to ignorance and should not be excused, especially when it’s the kind of thing I drew your attention to last post. Now the difference between a generic rude poster and C and his like is that the former will post an incoherent sentence consisting mostly of scorn when he reads your assertions on Arab people; C, on the other hand, will correctly say something like “Sam enjoys a blissful innocence of the facts re MENA societies, cultures, and history” and explain the basic fallacies without necessarily stepping over the line. Stepping over the line happens when someone posts something really idiotic, and then he loses his patience.
He may be criticized for occasionally being too harsh with some posters, but note that he always addresses their arguments even when the arguments are abysmally stupid. And he addresses them well.
This is the same fallacy contained in your explanation to account for the “performances” of Arab countries; the real reason Collounsbury “wins” (in those discussions he does “win”) is because he argues from a highly informed viewpoint, which is appreciated by those also informed on the relevant topic. Take, for example, the crap posted by ThenHeCame in this page of this thread, and look at C’s blistering responses. IMO they are perfectly appropriate responses to send to someone spreading that sort of bullshit.
Hearing the same baseless attacks on the UN (as one example in the thread above) gets really frustrating after a while, a bit like the flood of repetitive Creationism nonsense we had on these boards a while back. I’m just glad that Collounsbury has the energy to blast such ignorant statements time after time. He also irritates people by pointing out segments of US policy that are isolationalist and unilateral, and he addresses them from a worldy point of view as opposed to the more ignorant provincial points of view of “we don’t need anyone else” or “Americans should not be subject to anyone else’s laws” or “Europeans are just full of hot air” or “the Kyoto Protocol would have been useless waste of time anyway” etc.
Finally he is a tireless opponent of racism and ethnocentrism, and we can only respect that regardless of his tone. Except for the racists and ethnocentrists, who I imagine take a dim view of his activities.
I do not think the statement of yours I quoted is defensible, certainly not as you characterized it, and I provided a more accurate analysis later in the thread that contradicts almost everything you stated. Your guess as to the “performances” of the region becomes irrelevant, and it’s offensive to insist it has merit in the light of information provided. You could easily have framed your guess as an honest question rather than presenting it as an informed position. The preface “As I study the Middle East more…” indicates to readers that you are at least partially informed on the topic, and unsuspecting posters might even take your mildly presented but nonetheless offensive take on the situation as fact. I find that quite alarming, whether or not you intended it that way (because the effect is the same).
But overall I think C does go too far sometimes, in fact I believe all posters (including the undersigned) go too far sometimes, if not with outright vitriol then with heavy sarcasm, or misinformation/dishonesty, or just poor debating. Collounsbury is one of the “bad cops” but from everything I can tell his contributions to this board are as valid as those of “good cops” (and, as observed, he may skate up to the line but does not necessarily cross it every time).
I just wish certain people didn’t try to imitate his style quite so much. Reading the hastily composed but information- and analyses-rich posts of one C is quite enough, and I can’t stand the imitators who can’t pack one tenth of the good sense into their posts, but include three times the insults. Frankly if Collounsbury’s posts were not packed with relevant information and shrewd analyses, I would find them obnoxious, so you can imagine my opinion of this imitators.
You are wrong. It was not a jibe at jshore. This was explained in the thread. You should read it.
If you think I won’t tell someone exactly what I think of them on this Board, then you obviously know so little about my posting style that you lack the qualifications and experience to attack me properly.
If you think you have a case about that thread, you know what to do.
Or if not, you know how to apologize. Read a few threads to find out how, if that’s something that’s alien to your worldview or you just have too much pride to do it. You could start with some of mine, since at least I apologize when I’ve been an enormous fucking asshole.
What got me out of it, Sam, was people from both sides of many debates I was in posting pathological lies again and again, and being allowed to do so with impunity.
There is no right to free speech on this Board. Anyone who is deluded about this fact should mail tubadiva@aol.com and ask.
And there is a real-life analogy: imagine trying to debate the phalloentricism of Star Wars (the light sabers are a clear giveaway…a glowing phallus of destructive power) and just having people butt in to say “Star Wars sucks!”, “Didn’t that criminal pedophile Reagan do Star Wars too?”, and “If Carter had won in '80, we would have had Episode 3 by now. Boba Fett rulz!”
But most of all, I tired of the pathological liars, especially in the gun control threads, who have learned that all they have to do is post the same “facts” from HCI once a month in a GC thread to get a rise out of us. And after you spend time and effort posting a good, well-researched reply to shoot down their arguments (no pun intended), they come back next month and post the exact. Same. Thing.
And get away with it. I very rarely see anyone on their side call them on it, whichever side that may be, and there is no easy way to do what you would do IRL, which is say “Dude - if you’re not going to discuss this rationally, then leave.” and then make them leave if they kept acting like an assgoblin.
Anyone who thinks that “Everyone has a view that deserves to be heard, and everyone should be eligible for friendly, spirited debate” should hang out down at the local detox ward and try to dissuade the inmates that the “Alien Butt Burglars from Jupiter” (not a slam at jshore - I feel I now must say this every time, or I will be accused of ad hominems yet again…) are not really coming for their nightly anal spelunking.
I love the Ignore list, although I do find out that many of the people on my list love to take little swipes at me in posts because they feel safe. :rolleyes:
And I love adding more and more people to it each day, too. It is the ultimate and most effective sign of my contempt for them. It means that I will sit through a motherfucking “Old Navy” advertisement with a fucking chimpanzee on it (and I hate chimpanzees!), and yet I will not take the time to read their posts.
And, I imagine, that’s gotta hurt knowing that.
Well, my apologies, I uncharacteristically had to defend workproduct from chuckleheads.
Just did.
Well Anthracite, I really don’t ‘follow’ others posts per se
such that I am able to divine what is going on in their heads. I would say that given several posters of more than ordinary reading skills read it in the same manner as I did, that the interpretation stands on its own. Now you have explained otherwise. All well and fine, perhaps the non-obvious
explanation is best in the end.
Doesn’t strike me as terribly useful to drag the rest of this out,
other than to note that I take full and complete responsibility for my own temper and excesses when they arise.
Be that as it may, I seriously doubt that I am influential in any
manner such that the tone of the debates has been singularly effected by me. If it has truly been so influenced then I deserve to be dumped. I find it nonetheless ironic, and indeed revealing that Sam mentions quote unquote conservative posters
such as Milo in the same context as vaunting a higher tone in the past.
Indeed I distinctly recall being called a Commie and a PC something or other in re the race issue (not by Milo, to avoid a misreading). A subject where there are certain kinds of unambiguous data.
In other subjects, e.g. gun control, there are not unambiguous data and indeed it appears from the links provided that there is precious little good data one way or another.
So, such is the matter of debating.
Use or ignore as you like.
Well just to prove that this is not a partisan issue, here’s a poster from the left end of the political spectrum chiming in to say that Collounsbury is an ass. (Why sugar-coat it in the Pit?) And like Sam, I believe his posting style has the effect of stifling debate on these boards. Not because he is unfailingly correct (he isn’t, by a longshot), but because posters who disagree with him are loath to descend into his world of petty vitriol.
Being a lefty, I agree with many of the points the guy makes, but I have no patience with his abusive posting style. Why are his supporters (and I’ll resist the temptation to call them sycophants) willing to tolerate behavior on a message board which they would surely condemn if it occured in the context of personal conversation? Are you so blinded by partisanship that you do not recognize unrelenting boorishness when it comes from the left?
Abe wrote:
It is to laugh. Collounsbury and I have tangled in a couple of threads, and the man never fails to toss in a gratuitous personal attack. In fact, if he has carried on an extended debate on this board without launching a personal attack, I’ve yet to see it. Please point me to the thread.
Yes and no. They do tend to be oblique. (I assume this is by design, to avoid the wrath of the Mods.) But the attacks are almost never related to the issue at hand.
Scorn is no substitute for reasoned debate.
Verbosity is no substitute for wisdom.