Any chance you’re a divorce attorney?
So, this divorce lawyer is sitting in his office, and in walk two of the oldest people he’s ever seen who announce that they want a divorce.
“Excuse my asking, but how old are you two?”
“I’m 94, she’s 92.”
“And how long have you been married?”
“Seventy-three years.”
“Seventy-three years! And now you want a divorce? Why now?”
“We were waiting until the kids were all dead.”
I responded to everything in your post, and it’s you who dropped the exchange when you decided to adopt for the occasion the “Ooh look what the Big Meanie did to me” stance instead of the “I’m just laughing at you” stance that you sometimes go with.
Insulting people and debating are two different things, and I know the difference but each can be appropriate in different circumstances. With you, it’s more generally the insulting that’s more appropriate. Which is a bit unfortunate because you do appear to have above-average intelligence (though not nearly as much as you think) and are capable of debate, but this tends to be obscured by serious character flaws.
One of these is that you’re a lying weasel, and this was the focus of both instances that you cite of me being “obsessed”. In the first instance, it was your obviously false claim that you used the name Fothering whatever because you were “shortening” Fotheringay-Phipps. In the “Dudegate” instance, it was your almost-as-obviously false claim that you referred to Jonathan Gruber as “this one dude” completely at random, and not as part of an attempt to support the point you happened to be making at the time about Gruber’s relative unimportance to the ACA.
Which is a big part of your MO on these boards. In the Dudegate thread you ultimately expressed some annoyance at the notion that I was accusing you of being some sort of “devious mastermind”, and within the confines of GD rules all I could do was deny implying that you were any sort of mastermind, and the same applies for your claim in this thread that the notion is of some “conspiracy” on your part. Because that’s not it. What you are is a glib off-the-cuff phony, who says whatever he thinks at the time will support the point he’s making or the image he’s trying to project in that particular post. One of the reasons you engage in so much back-and-forth weaseling is precisely because you don’t have any sort of master plan of where you’re going with the things you say, and have to bounce back and forth trying to escape the tangled web you’ve woven in your smug snarkiness or hyperpartisan hubris.
And the same goes for substantive matters as well, a recent example being that same “dudegate” thread, where you shifted from your initial claim that all slippery slope arguments are logical errors to a revised claim that some slippery slope arguments are fallacious, while trying to pretend that you were simply backing up your original position.
This is your consistent approach in matters great and small and it would be a very frustrating experience for an ideological opponent to take you seriously as a debater with any sort of integrity, and the only workable approach if you happen to make a point that deserves a response is to just make whatever points are relevant to the thread, and when you start playing your rhetorical games to find whatever amusement there is in pointing out what you’re up to. Which is what I’ve done and intend to keep doing, to the extent that the interest holds. Of course, this might require you to keep up your “mocking” pretense, but that’s OK – maybe you should make a shortcut key – knock yourself out.
The world is full of sanctimonious hypocrites, but ISTM that LHOD is in a class of his own. You can read any number of threads in ATMB which feature LHOD piously calling for higher standards and less snark to enable more substantive debate (as in this very thread, FTM). And yet, he is himself one of the snarkiest posters on these boards. But, as above, I don’t think he is really thinking it out at all, let alone has any sort of coherent philosophy about it. Calling for higher standards makes him look like a Serious Intellectual, so he does it when the opportunity presents itself. Zinging other posters with snide remarks makes him feel smugly superior, so he does this too when the situation arises. I don’t think there’s really anything more to it than that. Just a preening, posing phony.
Again, the fact that it’s rarely a perfect technique doesn’t mean that it’s also not a useful one. Very few techniques are perfect.
And if it gets people heated up, well that’s not uncommon either, even in threads in which such accusations don’t feature.
IME it’s fairly rare that an SDMB debate thread contains meaningful communication etc., and it’s even more rare in the hot-button partisan type threads that lend themselves to accusations of hypocrisy.
Bottom line is that there’s a positive and a negative aspect to it, and in your opinion the negative outweighs the positive and in my opinion the positive outweighs the negative, and it’s one of these judgment calls that can’t be proved either way so everyone does their thing. (The only way to resolve it would be to find another thread where one of us has expressed the exact opposite position when it served our interests … :))
And this is why you’re so funny, and are the gift that keeps on giving.
No, you didn’t actually say “I don’t name call”. What you said was
What makes this a hypocritical lie is that you then attacked the maker of the arguments, and then rather childishly resorted to “I am not arguing with you, so there”, which is further proof that your assertion that one should attack the meat of an argument was a pathetic lie. So you were lying when you said one ought to attack an argument, and also lying when you said one ought not to attack the maker of an argument.
[QUOTE=Fotheringgay-Phipps]
The world is full of sanctimonious hypocrites, but ISTM that LHOD is in a class of his own. You can read any number of threads in ATMB which feature LHOD piously calling for higher standards and less snark to enable more substantive debate (as in this very thread, FTM). And yet, he is himself one of the snarkiest posters on these boards. But, as above, I don’t think he is really thinking it out at all, let alone has any sort of coherent philosophy about it. Calling for higher standards makes him look like a Serious Intellectual, so he does it when the opportunity presents itself. Zinging other posters with snide remarks makes him feel smugly superior, so he does this too when the situation arises. I don’t think there’s really anything more to it than that. Just a preening, posing phony.
[/QUOTE]
He isn’t actually much worse than many others hereabouts - just less self-aware. He is used to arguing with anarchists and with second-graders, and the emotional range between the two groups isn’t great enough to correct his delusions of superiority. Maybe that explains why he wants to try the “I don’t care what you think, so there!” schtick, but I would think observation would have made him better at it.
Keeping in mind that I am not arguing with him by answering everything he says, I would never call such a dumbass names, and I am not trying to find hypocrisy in his posts. No one who says one thing and does another so blatantly could be a hypocrite.
Regards,
Shodan
Except you didn’t make an argument. There was no meat to attack.
One thing that’s interesting to me is how cheaply you and FP hold integrity, that you toss it around as an insult constantly and your go-to move in an argument is to attack the integrity of your opponent. It’s true that attacking my integrity is probably the best way to get under my skin; my integrity is pretty important to me, and I therefore don’t toss around such accusations about other people lightly. The best thing for me to do when y’all make your moronic attacks on my integrity is to remind myself just how intellectually bankrupt you are; you can yap at my heels all you want, and I can walk on by. Or at least, I should.
Maybe that explains the lack of self-awareness on your part. If integrity is important to you, your posts aren’t going to bear much self-examination or else you wouldn’t come across as you do. Hence, possibly, the ludicrous self-parody of “I detest hypocrisy-hunting and Fotheringay-Phipps is a hypocrite” of your previous posts. Or the “here’s where you’re wrong but I’m not arguing with you” that you have trotted out. Come on - don’t you see, just a little, how grotesque that sounds?
But then again I have the advantage of you. It gets under your skin for me to question your integrity. That’s understandable, particularly if it resonates - that you recognize (should you allow yourself) that I might have a point. Rightly or wrongly, I am much less likely to allow you to get under my skin. Because accusations of hypocrisy from a hypocrite? Let me know when we get to the part I care about.
Which is not to say I won’t engage with you outside the Pit on a serious level. Elsewhere you cannot distract from the meat of an argument with behaviors you allegedly condemn, and there (to give you credit) you come across much better and less childishly. IOW you follow your own advice non-hypocritically. Which is as it should be.
You should, or at least it is up to you if you do or not. I suspect more than slightly that on some level, you recognize how lame an excuse “I wasn’t really arguing with you” is, especially after being rather badly exposed. So you may need some other, hopefully less lame excuse to try to get the last word.
Which you may certainly have. Perhaps you will do better next time.
Regards,
Shodan
Again: is there anyone else besides you two who didn’t get the joke in that–especially after the linked video? Because for the love of god, I couldn’t have made it more obvious. I explained the joke in the joke.
Edit: and if you think the joke is that I was pretending not to say the comment but I did, you totally didn’t get the joke.
For whatever my reaction is worth: I got that you were saying what you said in a meta-, joking way.
But I also thought that given the discussions in the thread thus far, it was the wrong time to try out that particular approach to humor, because I don’t agree it was unambiguous.
It may well have been the wrong time. I find meta jokes entirely too amusing and don’t resist them often. Glad that its nature was clear to at least some.
A joke is not a “Get Out of Hypocrisy” card. If you intended to communicate the same message, then you’re just as big of a hypocrite phony regardless of whether you imagine that you’ve communicated it in a humorous way. And if you’re now denying that you intended to communicate that message, then you’re being a liar about it as well as a hypocrite.
Of course, the reason I have to tease this out of you is because you’re being coy about saying anything beyond “hey, I was making a joke, don’t you get it?!”. Leaves more wriggle room and harder to pin down.
All in all, you’re just being LHOD. You are what you are, more’s the pity.
Sober commentary indeed from herr douchepickle.
I await the condemnation of other liberals for that comment.
No, you moron, I’m not denying I said it. You’re too stupid too understand why I said it, just like you’re too stupid to understand the misspelling of your name and too stupid to understand the use of dude. You build your entire approach on attacking other people’s honesty. It’s pathetic.
Hint, though: I never claimed a “get out of hypocrisy” card. That’s kind of the fucking joke.
Bad Lobohan! Bad!
I get the impression that in FP’s mind, he’s sitting in an elegant hardwood study, wearing a smoking jacket, with a snifter of brandy and a cigarillo, absently casting off pithy remarks with which to chastise the hooples.
Pithy?
What’s the difference why you said it? What counts is what you said.
I mean, I’m pretty open that the reason I’m engaging is discussions of your complete lack of integrity is that I find it amusing. But I wouldn’t use that as an excuse if I was also simultaneously loudly opposing pointing out people’s lack of integrity. That would be hypocrisy, and I leave such behaviour to you.
I am rebuked!!!
In his mind, I mean. In reality he’s a giant pucker shitting out word-salad.
Aha–a question, instead of a Kreskin! Here’s the answer: I was making fun of myself for being a hypocrite on the issue. It was all meta. The joke didn’t work if I wasn’t chastising folks for hypocrisy hunting. It didn’t work if I didn’t do something hypocritical. It didn’t work if I didn’t call you a hypocrite. All those pieces had to be there for there to be a joke.
That’s why there’s a difference. And that’s why it’s so dumbass for you to crow about how you uncovered my hypocrisy and for you to spend all your energy pointing it out.
I am 100% sure you still won’t understand. But others do, so maybe one of them can explain it to you.
Oh, I understand what you’re saying. I just don’t believe you.
I think your purpose was in getting the hypocrisy accusation across in a semi-humorous way, so as to cover for yourself.
But it doesn’t really work that way. I explained this earlier.