I know, but do ANY of the criticisms in FP’s post apply to you?
Nicely put.
I would take it a step further - most of the opposition to Bricker, as in this Pitting, is an attempt to take hypocrisy hunting off the table only when it is aimed at liberals. The Usual Suspects would be perfectly happy with any number of threads or posts pointing out conservative hypocrisy. They just don’t like it when it comes looking for them.
No u.
Regards,
Shodan
No – this pitting was meant to highlight that (briefly) Bricker admitted that he was planning on saying things that he knew were ridiculous because he thinks those tactics work. Later, he decided that he wouldn’t do this any more (after I said I was inspired to do a better job to criticize stupidity on my side).
And then we made love by candlelight.
I wish I knew how to quit you.
One of us is going to have to leave Northern VA. You’re hereby banished to Delaware. For the crime of loving too hard.
The problem with what you’re saying is that while it might make sense in theory, it basically never works that way in practice.
Sure, let’s envision a situation where a Rep. congressman has just been caught diverting campaign funds to keep his underage girlfriend quiet. And a bunch of liberals complain about it, one of them being me, and I very specifically said that this type of scandal was so serious it meant that he should immediately be thrown out of congress. And then you realize that a year earlier there was a Dem. congressman who was caught diverting campaign funds to keep his underage girlfriend quiet, and lo and behold, there was an SDMB thread about it, and in that thread, I posted that it wasn’t a very big deal, and he should just get a slap on the wrist.
Well, hurray! You successfully proved, in an AMAZINGLY contrived example, that I, maxthevool, am a hypocrite. Good for you. So… what next? First of all, you didn’t prove anything about any of the other liberals posting in that thread, unless every single one of them also posted in the previous thread. Furthermore, while it gives you some bit of moral superiority to sneer at me personally, it doesn’t really change how serious the scandal was, or what the proper punishment is, one way or the other.
But, and this is the key point, it NEVER works like that. It never even comes close. Take Bricker’s constant bringing-up of the MA Senate business in voter ID threads… what are the key differences between it and the perfect storm of catching-someone-being-a-hypocrite above?
(1) It’s NOT an identical issue. It’s not even a similar issue. It’s broadly in the same category but there are PLENTY of individual details of voter ID laws which are missing from the MA Senate business and vice versa
(2) He did NOT find specific posts from specific posters supporting one and condemning the other. The best he ever did was more or less “hey, you didn’t condemn the MA Senate issue. Lol you’re a hypocrite!” “What? I have no idea what you’re talking about” “This thing where TERRIBLE things happened. Please go research it and then come back here and properly express your outrage” “Well, it seems kinda scuzzy but I really want to talk about voter ID laws” “Oh, only kinda scuzzy? What a weak and meaningless opinion. Clearly you LOVE it when that happens, you hypocrite”.
There’s one other very important point here, which is very few of us claim to be perfectly objective at all times. I think that I’m a reasonable poster who treats people and issues fairly and objectively. I’m also a human being with emotions. It’s entirely possible that if you took the totality of my posts on the SDMB and fed them into the bias-detector-tron-9000 it would chug for a while and then it would prove with charts and graphs that my condemnations of liberals are 3% less harsh than conservatives for similar offenses. So what? I’ve never claimed to be some perfectly objective arbiter of fairness. I’m not a judge. I’m not a moderator. I’m just some guy. I try to be fair, but if I occasionally don’t succeed to some absolute standard of monolithic perfection that doesn’t somehow immediately invalidate every argument I’ve ever made.
One final point: Yes, finding examples of Democratic politicians engaging in skullduggery disproves some strawman argument like “ONLY Republicans ever do bad things”. But no one ever seriously makes that argument. People sometime say things like “there is MORE Republican skullduggery in recent years than Democratic”. And that’s a point that can be debated. But bringing up individual examples of Democratic skullduggery doesn’t somehow immediately disprove it.
To be fair, no one does. Not even you.
I’m not sure if or how this addresses any of the points I made.
In this example, I would say the first point applies. How serious of a crime is a congressman diverting campaign funds to underage girlfriends, and what type of sanctions are called for in this circumstance? Having an overwhelming consensus in a thread (or IRL) that this is horrible, horrible, horrible, and deserves the ultimate sanction possible and anyone who suggests otherwise is virtually an accessory to child abuse has a weight to it. And it’s an unjustified weight, if this is not in fact a general attitude. So it’s worth pointing that out.
It very rarely does. I agree. But that’s the nature of these discussions in general, and you could say this about any type of argument. People very rarely change their minds about things, and it’s very difficult to find perfect comparisons. You make your case, and show why you believe what you believe, and if people find this compelling that’s great and if not, well that’s the way it goes and you’re not going to be able to pin people down on it and force them to accept your reasoning. If you can’t hack that, you need to try another forum. Me, I can hack it.
I’m not sure which point this was addressed to. If you’re talking about the final point about putting phonies in their place, then I would respond that no one is perfect in general, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some who are worse than others. And to the extent that you’re one of the ones who are worse than others, then you’ll be a target of this type of criticism, much like you might be a target of criticism in any other area in which you are much worse than others. And if you’re generally OK but merely fall short of perfection as we all do, then you’ll likely not be much of a target (absent other considerations). I don’t think this is unique to this type of criticism.
I agree. But conversely, the initial focus on the story at hand of Republican skullduggery doesn’t prove that "there is MORE Republican skullduggery in recent years than Democratic”, either. So to the extent that the initial observation is being made with that connotation, then the counter-observation properly serves to negate it.
Also to be fair, I don’t complain about it nearly as much as the lefties complain about Bricker.
Conservatives get it from the left and from righties like **Bricker]. Liberals get it only from righties like Bricker and complain about it.
Regards,
Shodan
I wasn’t specifically responding to them… my primary response to them is that you seem to be saying “ok, so it’s sometimes possible to prove that people are hypocrites… why would we want to do so, is it desirable?”, to which my response is “it’s actually almost never possible to prove that people are hypocrites… and the board is much worse off if we spend lots of time trying, and generally failing, to do so”.
Sure, but if we’re already in a state where it’s rare to actually change anyone’s mind about anything, do constant digressions into accusations of hypocrisy make the situation better or worse? It’s fairly unlikely that at some point in the voter ID thread either Bricker was going to say “gosh, you’re right, these laws are a bad idea” or some number of liberals were going to say “gosh, you’re right, these laws are a good idea”. But whatever the likelihood of that happening was, my claim is that starting to instead discuss whether liberals are hypocrites due to their insufficient condemnation of totally unrelated acts by the MA senate reduced those initial likelihoods from slim to zero.
Sure… if someone seriously sets out to prove that there is currently more Republican skullduggery than Democratic skullduggery, then the burden of proof is on them, and that position is neither proven nor disproven by quoting small numbers of individual instances on either side. But the voter ID thread is not, for the most part, a thread in which people are arguing that Republicans in general are bad*. So to bring up examples of Democratic skullduggery as somehow relevant is basically trying to reframe the debate. It’s a distraction, a hijack.
*I phrased this particular line poorly, but trying to expound on it properly would exceed the edit window, I will post in greater length in a separate post.
Expanding on the last paragraph of my previous post… I said this:
“But the voter ID thread is not, for the most part, a thread in which people are arguing that Republicans in general are bad.”
Which is obviously kind of silly as written, because in fairness there are lots of people in that thread saying mean things about Republicans. Heck, the very title of the thread is “I Pit the ID-demanding GOP vote-suppressors”. I’m not trying to claim that there is no anti-GOP rancor in that thread… such a claim would be disingenuous at best.
However, this has all gotten kind of navel-gazing-y, so I’m not going to expand further unless anyone really cares.
So what we have here is a lot of complaining, all over the place.
Whether there’s more of this here or there is entirely debatable.
I didn’t say it’s possible to prove it. I said there are substantive reasons for bringing up the issue. As previous, it’s very difficult to prove anything in a mathematical sense in these discussions. But yet, they go on.
That depends on what you call “the situation”. I would say if the discussion is being incorrectly skewed in a manner that would be corrected by pointing out the inconsistency – and I listed several examples of this type of discussion - then yes, "the situation” is improved by bringing it up.
I don’t know anything about the voter ID thread, and I did not read it other than to glance at a bit of an exchange between Bricker and Lobohan that was cited upthread. My comment was not about that thread, but was a general comment about the value of hypocrisy hunting in various circumstances.
This is absolutely priceless. In defense of hypocrisy-hunting, you go hypocrisy hunting in the stupidest manner possible: you am bizarro-world hypocrisy hunting.
I dislike this idiotic hypocrisy hunting no matter who it occurs against. Someone pointing out what a massive hypocrite F-P is in his talk about “some who are themselves nothing but phonies, who object to having their pompous personas pricked” would be wasting time (yeah, yeah, what can I say, it’s the pit). That’s not a useful thing to do.
His objections boil down to:
- The minority can divert discussion from the arguments for a position by accusing some members of the majority of hypocrisy. Well, sure, they can–that’s not in question. The question is whether they SHOULD engage in such diversion. And they shouldn’t: it’s an ad hominem attack. Even if you hold the minority position, you should attack the meat of the argument, not the maker of the argument.
- Some people don’t practice the virtues they preach. Well, sure–that’s a problem. But there’s a difference between saying a specific person doesn’t practice the virtues they preach, and saying that it’s impossible to practice the virtues they preach. If a particular person condemns sex slavery, but it turns out that they visited a sex-slave brothel, does that have any effect whatsoever on their condemnation of sex slavery? Of course not. Only if it’s impossible to avoid frequenting sex-slave brothels does your second objection apply–and in order to demonstrate that impossibility, you have to do more than show one person’s hypocrisy. Again, attacking the person as a hypocrite is an ad hominem attack that does nothing to do to advance the argument.
- If there’s an implication that holders of view A engage in foible B, feel free to draw out that implication to make it explicit. then feel free to refute it, if it’s untrue. Note that this is different from an implication that holders of view A uniquely engage in foible B; if that implication is there, again, draw it out and refute it. I don’t think it’s as common as you claim, but do address it head-on if it’s there; I suspect that if you ask, you’ll find it’s not as common as you suspect.
Again, I have very little patience with this debate strategy of calling the other side poopy-heads; the mods can attest to the fact that I report liberals who engage in it in GD (indeed did so about half an hour ago in a thread that’s driving me bonkers with its failed potential for a good discussion). But even if I didn’t–EVEN IF I WERE THE HYPOCRITE SHODAN ACCUSES ME OF BEING–so the fuck what? Either calling out hypocrisy advances debate, or it doesn’t. I suggest that in virtually all cases, there are more productive ways of advancing debate than to cast aspersions on the motives of the other side.
This is, of course, quite dishonest - you are attempting to call F-P a pompous phony while at the same time condemning it as “not a useful thing to do”.
You should always attack the meat of the argument. But if you don’t, and you are a conservative, you will be attacked for it (as you and others have done with Bricker and Fotheringay-Phipps and myself). Whereas if you are liberal, by and large you won’t be. MaxtheVool and others have announced already that they aren’t interested either in holding their side accountable, or in seeing conservatives do it.
So you are arguing in favor of a heavily slanted status quo, because it is one where your side has the benefit.
So your accusations against me do nothing to advance your argument, and you know and acknowledge it. And do so anyway.
That’s what I mean by arguing in favor of a biased status quo - you want to hold Bricker and F-P and myself to a standard that you don’t wish to abide by yourself.
If it advances debate, then stop complaining when Bricker does it. If it doesn’t, then stop complaining and concentrate on the meat of an argument instead.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s like the old “I don’t want to say your mother is fat, but …”. I remember that kind of stuff, if from a long time ago.
Personally I would be embarrassed to combine those three sentences with each other – 2 in which you condemn practice as idiotic and state how you dislike it, and the third in which you engage in this very practice. But maybe that’s just me.
But what it all goes to show is that hypocrisy hunting is fun and entertaining, and even people like LHOD who loudly object to it as a general rule can’t resist when they think they can get in a good dig. Might as well give it up.
That’s not what I said.
I didn’t say impossible, but difficult, and thus impractical as a policy. Each incident is a data point, and enough data points suffice as the basis of an opinion.
Difficult to pin this type of thing down – it’s frequently the premise but not overtly stated. And different people can have different positions about it, which also makes it hard to address directly.
“Yeah, yeah, what can I say? It’s the pit”. You even quoted that, and you still call me dishonest, ya dumbo.
The awesome thing is that you continue to defend this sort of ad hominem by engaging in this sort of ad hominem. You can’t help yourself, can you?
To be perfectly clear, I don’t think you’re worth arguing with. Bricker is; F-P sometimes is, when he’s not building giant conspiracies about the word “dude.” You’re just a ridiculous little man who’s fun to make fun of.
Again: the parenthetical comment was key. This might help explain my reasoning.
IT’s what it boils down to.
How many data points suffice? Because a single one hardly does. Even if every poster who espouses a position in a thread is a hypocrite, it still doesn’t suffice.
So what if it’s difficult to pin down? Addressing an argument head-on is far more effective than calling the debaters poopy-pants.
I’m not going to watch YouTube at the office, but your parethentical remark doesn’t change anything. Either it’s worth doing or it’s not, regardless of being in the Pit.
If you were honest with yourself you would admit that you were irked at the implication that you were a phony etc. and couldn’t resist the opportunity to respond in kind, and phrased it in the “it would be a waste of time to point out that X” format to try to conform to your position in some completely superficial way.
No, it’s not.
That particular point was more about people’s conduct IRL than about posters in a thread. As in “Liberals/Conservatives are excoriating so-and-so for failing to uphold such-and-such standard that they’re now proclaiming to be important, but guys on their team have done the same, so maybe that standard is not so realistic”. That is a substantive point.
That’s a false dichotomy.
I agree in general that a hypocrisy argument can’t be the sum total of what you’re saying. But if you have a point to make as well, the hypocrisy angle can add to it, in circumstances such as I’ve described.
Oh, shut up, dumbass.