I’m honestly not sure what you are saying. What I’m saying is this: if you have a message board based in Chicago discussing sports, you’re going to have way more Bears fans on the board than Packers fans. And when Packers fans are arguing about contentious Bears-vs-Packers issues, there are going to be more people ready and willing to pounce on factual or logical errors they make, large and small. And that’s not because Bears fans are bad people who are unable to criticize their own, it’s because people are people.
I have two responses to that:
(1) to a certain extent, that’s clearly true. People respond differently to liberals than to conservatives. I figure you’d know that by now. We agree.
(2) That said, there’s a difference between “fighting ignorance” and “ensuring that every tossed-aside snide comment gets properly assessed on the truth scale”. I saw Elucidator’s comment originally, and saw him get rebutted pretty effectively, and saw him acting like a weasel, and it’s not like that was at that point spreading dishonesty or misinformation. Elucidator refusing to man up and say “yes, I was clearly wrong in my insinuation” and instead just dropping it is in no way making the world dumber or more poorly informed. It’s arguably making the SDMB itself a place with less rigorous standards of honesty, or something meta like that, but if you’re looking for examples where liberals are actively spreading ignorance and are not getting called on it, this is a very very poor one.
(a) - (c) are generally correctly stated. (d) is not.
I’m curious: can you do any better job than that of summing up my argument concerning voter confidence? Most rebuttals to my point have simply dismissed it as you have: a handwave and scare quotes indicating that it is of no real import.
Is it because I have failed to explain it in a comprehensible way? Or do you understand my point, disagree with it, and show that disagreement by treating it this way?
I don’t agree that there’s any violation of fundamental ethical decency. And since this is a point on which we disagree, and on which there is no clear consensus in the country, can I suggest that it amounts to simply your opinion, and not an objective failure on my part?
When abortion is discussed, the point is often made that calling it murder is wrong – it is, after all, lawful. I agree.
Why, in this case, are you entitled to “call it murder,” so to speak?
Campaign finance laws, at least since BCRA, also deal with a supposed problem that cannot be proved to exist. Campaign finance laws, also since BCRA, are meant to infringe on the 1st amendment. They are not only immoral for that reason, but also illegal.
Yet most liberals(other than the ACLU and Glenn Greenwald factions) support censorship of political ads.
Now I understand the reasoning, and while I got overheated on the issue a few pages back(thus drawing the yellow flag from Bricker), I know that most liberals aren’t actually into censorship. Rather, they’ve bought into the arguments made by self-interested actors who want to increase their power and influence while dangling the impossible dream that the common people’s voice will be heard if only we stop rich individuals from buying 30-second ads. Much like voter ID, to the average person it sounds simple. If you did a poll on both issues, you’d find the public overwhelmingly in favor of both voter ID and campaign finance laws. But if you get a chance to explain why they might not be such a good idea, support would almost certainly drop.
I’ve heard the arguments against voter ID, and I still support voter ID. I think the courts have done a great job of making sure that voter ID laws do not substantially impact the ability of people to vote. If the ID is free, and you can show other proof of identity should you lose it, or failing that you can cast a provisional ballot where the signatures must match(which is Rhode Island’s law), then what’s the problem? I’m guessing many liberals fear that too many Democratic voters can’t even pull the task of having a consistent signature off. Actually, I’m one of those voters. I don’t even have anything that could be called a proper signature and it changes every time I write it. A lot of my co-workers are like that too. So I guess even a signature requirement is enough to disenfranchise some. But if you have multiple ways to prove identity, then there shouldn’t be much of a problem unless a person is a complete idiot. Or not who they claim to be.
As for the significance of the problem, part of the issue is that the authorities aren’t looking. It’s true that an organized campaign of voter fraud is nearly impossible, so it’s not worth expending resources to find. Organized vote fraud is usually done by absentee ballot(which we also need to get under control). But we do have felons voting, non-citizens voting, dead people voting, and double voting. When evidence of these problems are provided, the usual response is, “Oh, they just made a mistake! No crime was committed!” For the purposes of election integrity, it’s still a problem that needs to be rectified. “One person, one vote, unless you’re an idiot who voted by absentee and in person, in which case we’ll let you have two.” is not sound practice.
I’m not even sure why we would need to take this further with elucidator. Elucidator is a very cool poster, sometimes funny, sometimes informative, and doesn’t make a habit of jumping up people’s butts. He improperly discounted a cite because of the source, he was shown that the case did indeed happen pretty much as the Moonies described it, and he… moved on.
I don’t know, I see debate as a situation where you are primarily addressing an audience, not each other. You respond to each other’s arguments, but not each other personally. I don’t know elucidator and I don’t care if he owns up to being wrong or not. That’s for the readers to judge, not me.
OK, very valid point. The problem is that the underlying argument elucidator made is not even being addressed: whether is’s a valid rhetorical tactic to dismiss, out of hand, the Washington Times because of its ownership. I’m not aware of any widespread reputation for falsity that the publication has. A casual reader sees elucidator comment as he did, lose the subsequent battle of the cites, but refuse to admit error – which leaves somewhat intact the basic rejection. (“I might have been wrong about this specific incident, but that paper is still untrustworthy.”) Trinopus says as much when he chimes in to agree with elucidator.
Yes, i agree it’s not as major as conservatives denying the validity of global temperature measurements. But it’s not trivial either. When we debate media bias here, it’s often mentioned that bias can be seen both in how a story is reported as well as what stories a particular publication chooses to report.
Now we deny the validity of the Washington Times as a cite, and claim that the story therein can’t be found in other sources. Apparently many news sources chose not to carry the story. Was that bias? How can conservatives here fairly answer demands for “Cite?” when liberal news sources don’t carry the stories and the conservative source that did is unfairly dismissed as a reliable source of information?
THOSE are the reasons that elucidator’s “weasel” needed to be called out. I grant it’s not as severe as global warming, but again, it’s not trivial.
Yes, also very fair – except that the debate doesn’t have judges. I want the audience to see either elucidator’s concession or a liberal poster or two agreeing that an error was made… because the audience does not otherwise get a definitive answer to the claim. I assume the audience is not following cited links and reading the rebuttals therein for the most part.
For this reason, when I am wrong, I clearly and unambiguously admit error. If elucidator won’t, I feel there’s strong value in someone else showing it, someone who is immune from the perception of mere partisanship.
This is a problem that is universal, everywhere I’ve been: conservative publications are not evidence of anything, but liberal publications are legitimate sources. And the debate tactic is bogus. Anyone who has been into politics for more than a few weeks can read through the editorial slant and figure out what is likely to be true and what needs further checking. Conservatives mostly let liberal-slanted sites slide as legitimate, limiting themselves to picking apart where they went wrong because of their bias. Liberals see a conservative cite and just dismiss it out of hand without a rebuttal.
Yep. Sometimes a story only appears in a partisan publication because only partisans are interested in it. That doesn’t mean it’s not valid. For whatever reason, the mainstream media had little interest in the Kinston case, and I can understand that. But to conservatives, it was irritating to see the VRA used in such a partisan manner.
I think the attitude needs to be called out, not elucidator specifically. Which I did, right away, when I asked him if he thought the story had just been made up out of whole cloth.
A great example of a story appearing only in liberal publications and not the mainstream media or conservative ones is the 2004 election results in Ohio. Yet despite the fact all the sources are left-wing, most liberals will at least give the argument that the 2004 election was stolen a hearing.
Meanwhile, the IRS scandal was reported by the mainstream media as being an actual scandal, that same mainstream media reported that people were fired or resigned, and yet liberals cling to the idea that liberal groups were subjected to the same treatment: because liberal sites say so.
Its my understanding in the IRS case that once you got past the knee-jerk reactions, the scandal wasn’t all that scandalous, i.e. the issue loses importance to anyone willing to explore the details evenhandedly.
You aren’t? No shit? No idea about that? Not an inkling?
Might it be because if I am right about that, and I surely am, then your aspersions cast upon me are just so much buttwhistle?
I further notice that you have thusfar managed to avoid any comment on the complicity of Republicans that you have effectively exonerated, admitting that “some” Republicans have malign motives, as if to suggest that the rest of them are innocent lambs, untarnished by such sordid motives. But aren’t they complicit, did they not vote in favor? Did they speak out against such underhanded legalistics?
According to your shining principles of absolute honesty and fairness, they should have, yes? Did any of them do so, can you offer us the long, long list of upstanding Republicans? And if we are obliged to speak out harshly about such monstrosities as the Massachusetts Massacre, howcum you are not equally obliged here?
Do you know of any who did so? Give us their names, that we may gasp with joyous surprise!
I don’t TOTALLY agree, but it’s a reasonable analysis of the facts. It all depends on what you were looking to get out of the case. IMO, there are four types of reactions:
- Democrats wanting it to go away
- Republicans wanting it to lead to the President and his impeachment
- People who are satisfied with what we know now and see it as a genuine issue that needed to be resolved, but not quite a scandal.
- People who take IRS wrongdoing as a serious scandal in its own right and want to get to the bottom of it and reform the IRS to correct the problems that took place.
I’m in the fourth camp. I’m convinced that the President had nothing to do with it, but I’m also convinced that the government work force has started to embrace partisanship due to the fact that the GOP has all but declared war on government unions. Conservative sites have been complaining about partisan motivated actions from other agencies as well, so there could be something wrong with the culture that needs to be corrected. No matter how much government employees grow to hate the GOP, their jobs are a sacred public trust. We might need an independent watchdog with the power to recommend the termination of indivdiuals who engage in partisan actions when they are supposed to be treating all Americans equally.
Well, the problem with getting “to the bottom of it” (as with Benghazi) is that it’s an open-ended process, and it too obviously became a fishing expedition pursued for its own sake and to try to keep the issue in the news.
It’s fine to make some general philosophical argument about unions, including government-worker unions, but I figure you need more than the so-called IRS scandal as evidence. The more I read about it, the more I’m left wondering what the big deal was except to get knee-jerk partisan political reactions.
Of course, I’m not the one anyone has to convince - I don’t get a vote.
In the case of both issues, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Less so with Benghazi than the IRS issue, where the primary culprit hasn’t said word one to Congress yet. Until she talks, we don’t even have half the story.
But in both cases, you’ve got three sides to the coverage: the right-wing media’s take, the mainstream media’s take, and the left-wing media’s take. And I believe that the left is far more likely to not just take their media seriously, but expect those sources to receive the same respect they give them, even though they don’t give right-wing sources the time of day. Most of the time, if a story only appears in the right-wing press, they don’t even know about it, whereas most informed conservatives at least have a passing familiarity with stories the left wing press considers important.
For example, I know that many liberals think Ohio was stolen in 2004. But the right-wing media was reporting shenanigans from the Democratic side in 2004 as well: in Wisconsin. And unlike in Ohio, there was concrete evidence that Kerry may have won Wisconsin because of fraud:
Key quote from the investigation:
"The reports of more
ballots cast than
voters recorded were
found to be true.”
The main recommendation is surprisingly not voter ID:
“It is the opinion of Task Force investigators that more than any other recommendation we could make, our investigation has concluded that the one thing that could eliminate a large percentage of fraud or the appearance of fraudulent voting on any given Election is the elimination of the On-Site or Same Day voter registration system… Given the inability of Election Inspectors to check the eligibility of a voter on the day of any election, there is no other way to ensure that only eligible voters are voting on Election Day.”
You support instituting voter ID to fight in-person voter fraud, to uphold voter confidence. Even though instituting voter ID without an honest outreach attempt at getting IDs in the hands that don’t have them will disproportionately impact Democrats, which, if you weren’t disingenuous, you would have to admit, should lower voter confidence.
In other words, you support a course of action that cures a virtually non-existent problem, and makes it worse.
You’re either stupid, or pretending you are while batting your eyelashes.
I don’t think you’re stupid. Although your various delusions can simulate it very well sometimes.
I’d like to point out that you just said, in apparent sincerity, that RW media is just as accurate as LW media.
I’d point out that the GOP base is motivated by shit like Pajamas Media, WND, and FOX News. The Dem base largely gets its info from MSNBC and Daily Kos and the like.
If lies and misinformation were punches in the nose, I’ll grant that the Dem voter would be woozy. But the GOP voter would be a twitching mass of shredded meat, brain and flakes of bone.
“Culprit”? Bit early for that designation, don’t you think? Or don’t you?
Probably, if I had realized how old this story was, I would not have thought it odd that there was no present-tense mention of it on Google. Should have occurred to me that it was a carefully preserved nugget of information several years old, lovingly preserved to be brought out for such occasions.
Also, there was the fact that the story was simply flung on to the page, without the grace of a link. As the Gentle Reader may have noticed, I have been forthrightly encouraging the young Mr. adaher that contentious postings need the support of linkage and reportage. Well, perhaps “encouraging” isn’t precisely the word, being more along the lines of “Hey, where the fuck is the link?!”.
(I will ask our resident expert on precise semantic deconstruction, when and if he is not too busy in his campaign against liberal hypocrisy. But here is a man steeped in such literal interpretation, that can tell you precisely that “sordid” is a mild declarative, very slightly disapproving, but “very odd” is clearly and unequivocally an accusation of dishonesty.)
But then he might well be too busy, what with gathering all those names of Republicans who forthrightly renounced, denounced, and condemned their party’s adventure in buggering the electoral process. By the by, how’s that coming along, Counselor?
No progress at all, since I don’t agree that the electoral process has been buggered in any meaningful way.
Nor does the Supreme Court.
Well, would you prefer a milder term of your own choosing, something with a light-hearted touch? How about “mischief”? Maybe it was all a practical joke, they really weren’t going to do anything like that, not really.
You say “some” Republicans are complicit in this…mischief. How do we know it isn’t all of them or most of them? How many are on record as firmly opposing? And how can it be that the Republicans who went along with this aren’t also complicit? They didn’t know, they never heard any objections? Fingers in their ears singing “LA! LA! LA!” really loud?
But never mind, won’t hound you on it. Busy fellow, I know, what with your relentless struggle against dishonesty and hypocrisy.