Which argument of mine is that infirm?
Pretty much all of them. Which has been pointed out to you repeatedly, to no effect. What, you didn’t read them and now invite me to review them?
I’ve been a member of this board since December 1999, posting approximately 41,800 separate times in those fourteen-plus years. I’ve come out against the death penalty and in favor of same-sex marriage. I’ve posted in support of Barack Obama and in derogation of John McCain. These are, I think, stances you personally favored.
So “pretty much all of them,” isn’t helpful.
Noob!
He said pretty much all of your arguments are infirm. Merely agreeing with someone doesn’t validate the firmness of the argument. I know lots of people who argue the same side of issues that I hold, who nevertheless present grotesquely infirm arguments.
I don’t go so far as to say that, in fact, “pretty much all” of your arguments are infirm. I’m only noting that your rebuttal fails to disprove the possibility.
(I’m learning pettifogging pedantry at the ankles of a master.)
Granted, and point well taken.
Do you believe all, or “pretty much all” my arguments are infirm to the degree that a fair summary of their strength is that they suck donkey balls? And I’d draw your attention to the point you just made: this is a weighing of the quality of my argument, not your agreement with the positions I take.
I am not Trinopus, but what makes you so irksome is neither your positions nor the quality of your arguments. Indeed your positions are often rational enough to leave us wondering why you support the party of duplicity and looniness.
What makes you so vexatious is your hypocrisy: the way you prattle your morality when it suits your partisan purpose, yet fall back on the letter of the law whenever it gives you a chance to disenfranchise a Black, or any voter unlikely to vote for the turds you support.
Most infuriating is your pretentious self-assurance that you’re the smartest twit at your keyboard. I still remember your bouncing into a thread to defend Karl Rove, without even bothering to read the OP, let alone to Google and find the man’s disgusting biography. Has SDMB at least fought your ignorance on that topic, or do you still idolize that key leader of your idyllic Republican Party?
I cant think of much more arrogant than to assume that in a competitive two party system, only one party is duplicitous and loony. This implies that half the country is also duplicitous and loony, or perhaps gullible and loony.
When you can’t accept that smart and rational people might support one of the two major parties, then it’s you who has a problem.
I’m okay with speculating that 40% of American voters might support the Republicans for sound reasons. The 10% who support them out of gullibility and looniness is what keeps elections competitive.
I can think of only two arguments on this board I ground in morality. One is my opposition to abortion, and the other is my opposition to the death penalty. Since opposition to the death penalty typically arises from a different political party than opposition to abortion, can you explain how this is “partisan?” Or can you offer any other positions I argue that I ground in morality?
Yes, I made an error in that thread, an error I admitted completely when I realized it. I have admitted error when I have made error – in sharp contrast to many posters here.
Which is of course a bad thing. Whereas people who support Democrats because they get a check in the mail because of them are only doing it out of patriotism and the country’s best interests.
If Democrats couldn’t use the taxpayers as their trillion-dollar campaign fund, they’d never get more than 30% of the vote in their current incarnation.
Why did you need to be asked? You don’t seem to require any such prompting in other instances. You repeatedly complain that leftish posters are reluctant to criticize one of their own and hesitant to denounce, renounce and condemn such horrors as the Massachusetts Massacre. So, what took you so long, and why did you require to be prompted?
You are willing to concede that the sacred goal of voter confidence can be achieved by other means that do not ride roughshod over the rights of voter’s access to voting, you will even stipulate that “some” Republicans may have sordid motives for their actions here. Well, what about the rest? Are they not complicit by their cooperation?
I stand ready to praise and approve such Republicans that condemned, renounced, and denounced such malign intentions. Got any names? Can you point them out for us, so that we may shower them with non-partisan attaboys? IIRC, you just make that rather vague stipulation, and then move along briskly so as not to draw too much attention away from the all-important issues of voter confidence and liberal hypocrisy.
You’re one tu quoque over the line, aren’t you?
27%. The crazification factor stands at 27%. Or stood there about a decade ago, at any rate.
Gibberish. I hope you don’t need a specific example of a disgustingly loony Party that had millions of supporters, as I don’t want to Godwinize the thread.
Let’s be clear. The Republican Party I condemn is not the Party of Eisenhower, Robert Dole, George Bush the Competent, etc. I refer to the post-rational Party about which one American commentator wrote:
[QUOTE=Garrison Keillor]
The party of Lincoln and Liberty has been transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brown-shirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch President, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
[/QUOTE]
I refer to the Party which calls The Benghazi Holocaust with its 0.004 kilocorpses the 2nd worst tragedy of the 21st century, while treating the Iraq stupidity, with hundreds of kilocorpses, and a cost of several teradollars as just an honest mistake – “Boys like to have fun.”
If we were starting from a tabula rasa and someone came up with a a new Party like today’s GOP, it would be roundly condemned as an insane joke. Instead it builds on history to get a free pass because of its name.
Hope this helps.
I explained the reason in my reply:
And we see that this is exactly the case here. adaher’s poor argument and unsupported hyperbole were roundly attacked by many posters. There was no lack of rebuttal. But my joining the criticism served to evaporate any suggestion that the critique of these arguments was grounded in partisan belief as opposed to a genuine weakness. That’s why I said, “But you’re still absolutely right.”
Here, in contrast, you made an assertion, were shown cites refuting it, and immediately moved on without ever saying that you were wrong, and apart from one poster besides me gently calling that “weaselyness,” no one else has criticized you.
I agree that that’s basically true, and unfortunate, and part of the feedback loop which keeps the board overwhelmingly liberal, which I think is a bad thing.
What I disagree with is your veiled insinuation that this is due in some part to a particular moral or behavioral failing specific to SDMB liberals, when in fact I think it’s a pretty inescapable result of basic human nature. Find any community with a large bias towards one side, (perhaps barring one with incredibly strict rules or customs) and, when discussing any issue that people really passionately care about, the various left-vs-right dynamics that show up on the SDMB will start to come into play.
There’s nothing crazy or gullible about voting for people who will give you money - it sounds like an act of self-interest to me.
Now, if accepting the money was a bribe to look the other way while Democrats destroyed or looted the country… well, are Democrats actually doing that anywhere outside of the fantasies of the gullible 10% who vote Republican?
Suppose 40% of Republican voters have concluded that they should vote Republican because they honesty believe Republicans will lower their taxes and manage the economy in a way that benefits them. Is that a more noble motivation than getting a check in the mail? And, for that matter, is it true for that 40% overall or just true for the richest 1% of them?
Beyond economic issues like taxes and entitlements, of course, are the wedge-issue voters, for whom a very small number of issues (possibly only one issue) informs their vote. It could be the gun-control candidate versus the gun-ownership candidate, the pro-life candidate versus the pro-choice candidate, the anti-death-penalty candidate versus the pro-death-penalty candidate, the anti-SSM candidate versus the pro-SSM candidate, the pro-Creationism-in-schools candidate versus the no-Creationism-in-schools candidate, all other issues be damned. I’m not sure if it’s fair to describe such voting strategies as “gullible” (I suppose they might be if one falls for a candidate’s promises to act on an issue, even if he never has before, or has in a way different from what he is now promising), but they’re certainly skewed and exploitable.
I don’t even know what you’re trying to claim, here - aren’t Republicans using taxpayers to fund their campaigns? Possibly a smaller number of very wealthy taxpayers - and I’m not sure that’s better than trying for broad appeal. And certainly both parties (and any party in a pluralistic democracy, really) has to seem appealing to a broad base to get even 30% of the vote, let alone enough to win. I suppose one could cite examples of Asian democracies (term used advisedly) that divided neatly along tribal lines, i.e. the Sunni candidate gets the entire Sunni vote because Sunnis vote for Sunnis and Sunnis take care of Sunnis, period, and fuck everyone else. That doesn’t quite seem the case in the U.S. though (I suppose some segment of the electorate would never vote for Obama because of his colour, even if the voter’s views happen to align with Obama’s on everything else), and I don’t expect that’s what you’re suggesting, so I don’t know what your point is.
I think the culture of this board is pretty different from most boards though. On most boards that talk politics, the idea is that it’s a virtual watercooler and you discuss and debate, and sometimes you’ll not have your facts straight, in which case someone corrects you(or tries to, sometimes who is right is a gray area). Over here, it’s more like you make a statement of fact, someone comes back at you with a cite that contradicts it, and therefore you’re wrong and they try to show you up. Which is not how debate works or how ignorance is fought. Some of these folks seem to think that debate ends with the first rebuttal, at which point they do a touchdown dance and give each other high fives.
Truly fighting ignorance means conducting debate the way the real people who fight ignorance do. If Cecil intended the message boards to feature debate conducted on a higher plane than places like Free Republic or Democratic Underground, that didn’t happen. Although personally I doubt that’s what he intended. Creating such a board is impossible without limiting the membership to invitation only.
While this is clearly true in an absolute sense, it gets less true when you focus on individual issues. For instance, I’m entirely happy to state that when discussing the issue of Gay Marriage, the smart and rational people are overwhelmingly on the pro-legality side of the issue. Same for whether-or-not-young-Earth-creationism-is-real. And that’s not something that I just always state about every issue I have an opinion on. But there are times when history shows us that one side of an argument was just plain wrong. There isn’t some mysterious principle of equality which states that any issue which is controversial is “balanced”, with both sides having equal numbers of good arguments and rational well-meaning believers.
To bring this back to the voter ID thread, am I arrogant enough to describe this issue as one that fits into the “I’m certain my side is overwhelmingly more correct and reasonable” category? Not really, because the issue is such a subtle and non-specific one. Clearly preventing voter fraud is a bad thing. Clearly many voters have forms of ID. Clearly voting always takes SOME effort. So the combination of things which combine to (in my opinion) make a particular law in a particular state unconscionable are a complex variety of factors, and subtle weighings of priorities, etc.
What I do very strongly disagree with is Bricker’s ethical analysis of the entire situation, which (correct me if I’m wrong) boils down to:
(a) he admits that the problem being addressed is, as far as anyone knows, tiny
(b) he admits that many of the people who proposed the law initially are probably doing so for partisan/unethical/scuzzy reasons (which, assuming those people aren’t total morons, implicitly admits that there is a strong likelihood that the impact of the law will in fact be disparate)
(c) but he points out that there is a on-the-surface-compelling justification for the laws
(d) and also “voter confidence”
(e) therefore the laws are perfectly fine and dandy, he’s utterly happy with the way his party has acted, if these laws bring slim victories in tightly contested races then, hurray, he will dance his happy dance!
The irritating thing about that specifically is that the normal stereotyped Bricker that we know and love who is so concerned about legality would go through (a)-(c), would say “here are arguments why these laws are, strictly speaking, legal”, but then would have the fundamental ethical decency to at least not gleefully dance on the grave of democracy just to rub it in. It is possible to hold a position like “these laws are, in my view, legal; but I think they are underhanded and I wish this was not a tactic my party was engaging in”.
If there was any such insinuation in what I said, I absolutely renounce it. It’s certainly a failure of SDMB liberals here, but I agree with your suspicion that it’s something that would almost certainly play out with conservatives on a conservative dominated board.
But on this particular board, its appearance runs counter to a number of themes that the board espouses. There’s a great deal of talk about “fighting ignorance,” and a great deal of derision levied against conservatives who ignore the factual evidence concerning global warming, for example. But the reality is, as you’ve suggested above, the fight against ignorance is fought when the ignorance is supporting an idea the board’s majority-liberal population opposes. When, as here, ignorance is used to support a liberal, there’s no real fight…just a poster pointing out that no one has any particular responsibility to counter ignorance when they see it.