Aw, hell, guys, let him have his gloat! Not like he gets much chance any more, and he needs it so very, very badly. Further, its not like we were losing his respect, or anything.
I don’t get why someone would punch a mirror, though. Sounds like you’d get cut or seven years bad luck or something.
Well, I’ll tell you what. Next time someone posts a story about ISIS killing US soldiers and it turns out to be false, we’ll apologize for that too. And the next time someone posts a story about Sarah Palin saying something incredibly stupid and it turns out to be fake, we’ll apologize for that too. And the next time someone posts a story about the sun rising in the east in the morning and it turns out to be false, we’ll apologize for that too. Yeah, the story’s fake. The fact that it’s so obviously believable, however, says far more about your end of the political spectrum than ours.
But … but … there were supposedly these two guys in Miami who voted! Brown ones too! It happened, it’s real! O, Blessed Mother of Vindication, it was all true all along!
I am certain your attention span for pretty much every aspect of your life is measured in single digit milliseconds.
You can admit you believed the story too.
Speaking of which:
How’s the Liberals’ War on Christmas coming lately? :D:D:D
So it turns out Shodan and Bricker were one and the same all along. I suppose there’s a Mrs. Shodan that helps it with the long sentences.
A few comments:
(1) I think there’s a legitimately interesting discussion to be had about how responsible you are for links that you post on the SDMB. I think there’s a big difference in context, between for instance:
(a) I see a link about a Republican politician saying something stupid. I post it in the Stupid Republican Idea of the Day thread and go on with my life
(b) I see a link about a Republican politician saying something stupid. I post it in this voter ID thread and use its existence as evidence for some point I’m trying to make, and quote it repeatedly
(c) I see a link about a Republican politician saying something stupid. I start an entire thread about it, in which I go on at great length about how this quote reveals and proves so much that I’ve always suspected about Republicans, etc.
I feel like the level of verification I should do before posting is greater in (c) than in (b) and greater in (b) than in (a). So is the level of apology I should provide if it turns out that the quote was a hoax.
(2) I still don’t quite understand what you’re saying. Specifically, I don’t see how it’s STUPID to post something that turns out to be a hoax and then “double down” and refuse to apologize (although it’s not clear to me precisely who you think did that, unless you’re just talking about the liberal hive mind). Intellectually lazy and, for lack of a better word, “weaselly”, perhaps, but not stupid or ignorant.
(3) To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter if some of the claims in the initially linked page are nonsense involving phrases like “picked up for processing”. There are certainly plenty of stupid people in the world. It’s very believable that a stupid (or ignorant) person would come up with and honestly propose a plan full of ignorant and nonsensical details. That’s where we come back to the idea of reporting-a-fact-that-happened vs reporting-a-plan-someone-honestly-supports.
(4) There’s also a tricky issue which I touched on concerning what it says about a group that a particular hoax about them is believed. Now obviously this is a VERY dangerous and slippery argument to make, because it leads to nonsense like “Hey, you guys did X, so…” “No we didn’t” “Sure, but you MIGHT have, so my point still stands…”. But specifically when you’re talking about a troll/hoax like this, a trollhoax, if it’s going to be believable, has to be something that is only slightly beyond reality. If I linked to a webpage of a group that claimed to want to force all women in the USA to be artificially inseminated with Barack Obama’s sperm, you should obviously immediately be suspect. If I linked to a page for a group claiming some slightly kooky and legally unsupported gun control belief, you might well believe it fairly uncritically because (in your view, I assume) there are plenty of groups that have various beliefs about gun control legalities. If this fake one is 5% kookier than any actual group, then it’s pretty darn plausible. And that’s the situation in which, if we assume that you’re a reasonable observer, the fact that this claim about a group with kooky beliefs did NOT set off alarm bells of implausibility tells us something about the legal beliefs of the gun control movement.
In the Republic of Fucking Morons, Bricker is king.
Not true. No moron could perform the complex intellectual gymnastics and intricate rationalizations as he does!
So under this tracking system, please rate my linking to and posting a quote from WAFF TV (not a Fox affiliate) concerning non-union electrical crews being turned away. I said:
Was that “pretty damn plausible,” or “immediately suspect?”
Well, first of all you’re passing on a story that was already posted by professional journalists (assuming WAFF TV isn’t some parody site or other), which takes a LOT of burden of verification off of you because you at least in theory can trust that they have been doing their job.
Aside from that, I dunno… I don’t know enough about unions and how they usually act during emergencies and so forth to be able to reasonably assess how much of an outlier (if at all) that story was. If, for instance, there are other examples in other emergencies in which unions DID act more or less precisely that way, but in this particular instance they did not, then it was clearly reasonable for you to believe that story.
Overall, I’d say that’s closer to plausible than immediately suspect, but that’s coming from a place of general ignorance.
Of course, I’m not sure how that’s relevant though, as at no point was I accusing you of having a double standard when it comes to retractions.
Wait, Bricker isn’t given proper credit for a willingness to admit when he was wrong? Gosh, if only he had said something!
I heard he hasn’t yet admitted he was wrong about gay marriage, but the report may be out of date.
A smattering of the responses I got for the WAFF story – which is a real TV station and not a parody site:
I’d like to point out, though, is the people you have quoted were saying you were stupid. Weren’t you saying, as regards the “armed monitors at polling stations” story that liberals were stupid? Or, if I may ask for clarification, would you care to name specifically who your disparaging comments were directed against?
No. I was not saying liberals were stupid.
I was saying that SOME of the liberals represented here were stupid:
My disparaging comments were directed against anyone who credulously believed and repeated the story from a single Facebook page four days old.
Of course, the standards I have to uphold are much higher. I can post a report from a TV station and get called stupid for believing it. And I accept that standard, as long as I can then apply it to liberals. But when it’s a liberal error, then along comes Max pointing out how plausible the error was.
I made no comment on that post by you. Yet you needed to vent your foul bile on te subject against me specifically.
Why? Because you’re still bitter I called you on your Karl Rove lies. At least you got the Waff hoax from the Internet. Your “facts” about Karl Rove were pulled straight out of your rectum. And you never apologized.
I will continue treating you with utter contempt until you conjure up the modicum of decency needed to apologize for the disrespect you’ve shown me.
So that’s… two people? I didn’t get the impression of a large groundswell of liberal outrage, myself, assuming “here” refers to the people on this particular message board. If it actually refers to some liberals somewhere who were taken in, I’m not sure yours is a particularly brave or impressive comment.
Apply anything you like. People are free to call you stupid for believing the conservative rage-bait, you’re free to argue why it was actually a plausible story, people are free to call you stupid for arguing such. You’re free to call some as-yet-unnamed members stupid for believing liberal rage-bait, others are free to argue why it was actually a plausible story, you’re free to call them stupid for arguing such.
You keep claiming you’re being held to some higher or differing standard, when it turns out you’re just as free as anyone here. If you can’t take others exercising their freedom (exactly the same as your freedom), you’re just a whiner. Are you getting more warnings from the local authority figures (i.e. the moderators) on the basis of your politics alone? If so, you have an argument, though of course it’s a privately-run message board that can set whatever standards they like.
That said, the story of a utility crew getting turned away from a rescue effort, well… I could picture it happening, but I’d be suspicious of the reporting, at least at first. Follow-up details would be a must before I felt sufficiently outraged to either start a thread about it or try to use it as a springboard for bashing people whose politics I didn’t like. Alternately, a supposed quote from somebody claiming that they plan to monitor an election fro voter fraud… well, there’s a hierarchy of plausibility:
Level 1: Somebody said it. Probability 100%, since if nobody had said it, we would never have heard about it.
Level 2: Somebody said it and actually meant it, i.e. they were totally serious about it. Probability: …significantly less than 100%. We get all kinds of blustery quotes from all kinds of people with all kinds of beliefs. I can picture somebody in the U.S. thinking that armed monitoring of polling stations to look for fraud is a good idea, even if they had to do it themselves.
Level 3: Somebody said it, actually meant it, and would actually follow through with it. Probability: very low, effectively zero. Frankly, if the story hadn’t been quickly revealed as a willful hoax (the union story struck me as more of a badly-reported misunderstanding), this is how it would have looked to me, comparable to a boast from the Westboro Baptist Church announcing their intent to protest the funeral of a major public figure. The announcement alone served their purpose. Following through would be impractical, even unnecessary.
Please clarify what you mean by “standard”, since your use looks a little prevaricating to me. You and liberals are being subjected to a different standard on this board, or conservative-bait stories and liberal-bait stories are held to differing standards, or the specific union story and the specific voter-fraud-armed-monitors story differ by standards of plausibility, or something else.