Super powers?
How kind of you.
I sadly made the mistake of engaging in good faith with the ominous DrDeth in the “How and/or where do US citizens learn that the USA is the best country in the world” thread. I should have known better.
It spiralled into him denying that he cited sources that I subsequently discredited, and then blaming me for bringing them up after he cited them before, not only by an aggregator site that uses them, but even citing them directly!
In short, his argument is that he never cited the things that he cited. You can’t argue with this imbecile. It’s like the gun debates – it goes round and round until your head spins and you give up. There is an entrenched ideology somewhere in his cerebellum, but no rational thought happening.
Was that his argument? I confess, i couldn’t follow his argument. It didn’t seem to address either of the two major issues with his cite, that it was out of date and came from unreliable sources.
We’ve had other posters along the way where I’ve seen other people say, or found myself saying “you do realize that, unlike a conversation in real life, on a message board, we can go back and see what you said, right?”
That’s one of those 'I never understood…" things. That is, I never understood how someone can post something, then later deny posting it and think they can get away with it.
I’ve also found that these are the very same people that, when confronted with their own posts (and this is common on facebook as well) will say something like “Wow, how much time did you waste looking for all those posts?” Like 90 seconds. You know there’s a search button, right?
In any case, that’s a lesson I’ve learned here. Once someone starts denying what they wrote, not denying my interpretation of what they wrote, denying that they wrote it at all, then lash out when it’s shown to them, it’s not worth the aggravation anymore. I’ll point out that they’re arguing in bad faith and drop out of the discussion.
His point is that he’s being attacked for using a cite that collected data from 5 data sets, two of which were from the CATO institute, which has a right-wing bias. But one of the data sets was also Freedom House, which also has a similar right-wing bias, according to a source he provided (MediaBiasFactCheck). And @wolfpup cited Freedom House upthread and nobody took issue with it. Is that a double standard? It certainly does seem that posters in that thread ignored the bias of a source when it supported what they believed, and attacked a biased source when it did not. I think that’s fair criticism.
As to the other argument, that the data in his cite doesn’t take into account the Trump47 administration, I think that’s a little disingenuous in a thread about how most Americans grow up thinking America is the best. Unless posters in that thread are teenagers, it’s safe to say that none of us grew up during the second Trump administration. For instance, I grew up in the '80s with Top Gun and Rocky IV and all of that, so if I believed that America was the greatest country on Earth, and I want to support that belief with some kind of metric, I should look at data from the '80s, not from the last 2 years. And if “Freedom Indices” show that America was a standout in the '80s, that’s a point in my favor. (Note: I don’t know if the data does show that, nor do I care.)
In any case, DrDeth posts like a lawyer who knows he has a shit case. He doesn’t like Trump and he’s with the rest of us in thinking that the situation is fairly dire, but he’s going to hold the line on whatever nitpicks he can get because that’s all he can do at this point.
E.g., in the McConnell thread, where most posters are very alarmed at how unusual McConnell’s office is being and how there’s no generous explanation for why they’re being cagey, DrDeth agrees. BUT he also believes, correctly IMO, that the evidence shows that the proof-of-life photos are not AI, and that they therefore show someone who’s not dead, brain-dead, or comatose. He concedes that everything else is a possibility, but he’s going back and forth with posters who think that the proof-of-life photos are fake or staged because he doesn’t think that’s a possibility, and he can point to the evidence to back him up.
A lot of the remaining conservative posters here get into a similar pattern. Because while plenty of people can acknowledge that he’s staked out a defendable line and then bring the discussion to a higher level where we can talk about how what McConnell’s office is nevertheless acting unethically, others seem more interested wallowing in that particular mudhole.
I think his defense of McConnell is a little weird. Because McConnell is being accused of two things:
- being too disabled to do the job
- not resigning
The first isn’t an ethical failing. People get disabled. It sucks, but there’s nothing morally wrong about it.
The second is arguably an ethical failing. And some people in the thread are making the argument.
But DrDeth is reacting to statements about (1) as if he is therefore defending McConnell from (2). And in some tenuous sense, they are related, because i suppose if you really think you’ll be better in a week, it’s more justifiable to keep the job than if you know you won’t. But he doesn’t make that claim, either. He just keeps treating claims against McConnell’s health as is he’s defending the guy’s honor or something.
Personally, i don’t know “freedom house”, so i didn’t attack the source. But i know the Cato institute, and i don’t believe anything they’ve touched. 
A bigger issue, although it’s far from limited to DrDeth, is that the thread is theoretically about “when did Americans come to believe their nation is the best”, and he seems to be arguing that it is, not talking about when and where American children learn this.
I mean, same. So it’s one thing to overlook wolfpup’s cite on first reading, but I think DrDeth made his point (and provided a cite).
But yes, the bigger issue remains that people shouldn’t be engaging him on this tangent. Greatness is subjective and, as you say, beside the point of that thread.
Not quite, but I do have to acknowledge a mistake on my part and thank you for pointing it out. I did indeed cite Freedom House for my stats, but not because it supported “what I believe”. I had no specific prior beliefs except a vague idea that the US freedom ranking generally was not very good, and certainly much worse today than in prior decades. I used Freedom House just because it was at the top of the Google rankings, and I humbly admit that I didn’t realize it was the same organization discussed later as being part of the “WorldPopulationReview” dataset. I thought it was an independent organization and not the one run by the US State Department whose funding has now been cut. I apologize if this has caused any confusion.
But here’s the important point. The aggregated data from “WorldPopulationReview” looks very, very different than the original data from Freedom House, giving the US a much higher rating (like, jumping from 80th place and declining, up to 15th place and doing just fine) which indicates that the data has been seriously skewed by the other sources, which are known liars like the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute.
So while my cite and the cite provided by DrDeth both include Freedom House, his stats are heavily polluted by known partisan liars. I went to some trouble to critique a couple of paragraphs from Cato to clearly show what egregious liars they are.
nevermind.
I have thus far resisted posting in this thread, but something just happened that pushed me over the edge.
It’s been noted that DrDeth is famous for leaving out the apostrophe when it should be there (like cant, dont, and wont). I just assumed laziness on his part.
But in the trivia thread in the Thread Games forum, he said:
It uses the CF-18 Hornet as it’s Primary Fighter aircraft.
(My bold)
So perhaps he has absolutely no clue on the proper use of this punctuation mark. Probably shouldn’t bother me, but it certainly does.
This is about as petty a reason to pit someone as I can think of.
Congrats?
On second thought, I’ll let this festering whale lie.*
*Not a reference to any mod, past, present or future.
I’m not the first one to do so in this thread.
Yes, DrDeth’s contempt for orthographic conventions is legendary. What makes it all the worse is that much of it is deliberately contrived, and some of us have had enuf of that shit.
That apostrophe in the possessive its: it’s a pebble in the shoe of my mind.
Well said. Glad to see I am not alone.
You’re not.
