[QUOTE=wolfpup;19510669Velocity…Velocity’s OP there was sufficiently annoying that I was going to reply but never got around to it. Basically it says, "hey, here’s a brain fart I just had and spent a whole 12 seconds thinking about before posting…[/QUOTE]
Yep. That’s exactly it. (I purposely left off the political part because I hadn’t even noticed that.)
This is the straw man I see, though. The vast majority of people against the death penalty don’t take an absolutist position against taking human life. People’s views on when killing is justified tend to be quite complex. All you have to do is talk to someone who is anti-death penalty to learn this, which is maybe what Velocity is trying to do with his OPs, but in this case he’s very much begging the question. (This works for pro-life folks, too, as you’ve pointed out…with the added complication that pro-life folks tend to be religiously motivated, in which case I can acknowledge the complexity of When Killing Is Acceptable but cannot reconcile it with the absolutist moral framework of many organized religions.) So I find the former inherently more ridiculous and strawman-y than the latter.
Hard to say what “the vast majority” think, but there certainly seem to be quite a lot of opponents whose opposition is based on some sort of simple absolutist position. A couple of random examples here and here. Enough, IMO, to make that point worthy of consideration.
mmmkay, fine. Your turn. Condense each of his OP’s linked in the, well, OP, down to a one-sentence question.
Go!
That sounds like something my teachers might have made me do back in elementary school. Fortunately I’ve risen past that by now. 
But not past the “I could do it much better than you, I just don’t want to!” phase of child development.
I plead guilty to that. Though I don’t consider it a “phase of child development”.
Neither do you, of course. You’re just saying it to be cute, as with everything else you say. Fortunately for you, you actually are cute, so you get a pass, I guess.
Vinyl Turnip is the cutest.
Given that the point of this pitting is to say that somebody has a tendency to start threads with a ridiculous OP and then deny any attempts to point out how he’s being ridiculous, looks like you’ll fit right in.
Somebody asked for a summary, I gave a summary. You pissed on it because I couldn’t be bothered to dredge my way through all of his horrific OP’s while admitting that you hadn’t either.
Put up or shut up. Tell us what perfectly reasonable questions he’s asking in these threads.
FWIW, I thought your survey was excellent. Plenty of (well dissevered) sarcasm, but not so much as to distort the facts beyond reasonableness. A+
Please advance to the head of the class! 
Seconded. Griping about how Ethilrist’s analysis was wrong without be willing to provide your versions is inane. It also completely undermines any credibility you might have. For the record, however, I think you have none.
Plus, now the SDMB has a go-to guy for whenever such surveys are needed!!
Ethilrist for Lord of the Surveys!! (It’s a life-long appointment 
)
Thanks. You don’t think the ringlet curls and giant lollipop are a bit de trop?
Oh my God. I know this is the Pit, but this is just cruel.
Can’t really argue with that. Problem is a lot of wannabes who share the same lack of substance with unsuccessful attempts at being funny. But VT generally pulls it off, and is an asset to the board.
So you’re admitting that you yourself didn’t even read through the very OPs that you were summarizing? That’s remarkable.
I didn’t feel the need to read through all the OPs, having read through the complete OPs of the few that I commented on. But I wasn’t purporting to offer a summary of those threads, as you were, and that’s not something I’m interesting in taking on.
If I noticed some people taking the National Enquirer at face value, I might inform them that the NE has a reputation for not being accurate. That doesn’t mean I would feel some obligation to put out a competing version of the NE, with a more accurate take on all their stories. I doubt if you would do any different. Most likely you would neither put up nor shut up.
Sarcasm has a place as a rhetorical device, when the actual facts are known. A sarcastic presentation of the facts can’t replace the actual facts, and people not inclined to wade through a lot of info can’t properly rely on a sarcastic version of it as genuine.
I did not comment on Ethilrist’s post when he first made it, but when it appeared that people were taking it seriously I thought it worthwhile to point out that he did not seem to be striving for the highest degree of accuracy, if you’ll permit a bit of an understatement.
What’s interesting about your approach here is the juxtaposition of this with your attitude in a concurrent ATMB thread. There, you are the main voice arguing for an extreme (and ridiculous, IMO) position opposing the use of inserting bracketed explanations into quoted remarks, based on the notion that someone could possibly misinterpret the quotee’s position, even though this would only be possible if the reader missed the entire meaning of the post and context of the conversation. This seems strikingly at odds with your attitude here.
What’s the relevance of “credibility” here? (Are you sure you know what credibility means?)
Has anyone invited the Man of Honor to this thread?
I looked in Great Debates today, and skimming just the titles of threads from the top of the page to the bottom, without scrolling down, I noticed 4 threads which seemed questionable based on their titles.
Specifically:
["Race doesn't exist" and affirmative action: Can't have cake and eat it too](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=798994)
[What do people claim was the reason for a Benghazi "stand down" order?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=799551)
[Why abortions would/wouldn't be legal all the way up to childbirth](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=799519)
The frequently-used “Blacks kill blacks, and it’s overlooked” argument (Black Lives Matter)
Each one of these appears to be built on a *really *unsound premise.
I thought this person was spam trolling and JAQing off, like a Glenn Beck acolyte, so I clicked them all and read up.
The first one was debunked immediately, as soon as the thread opened. OP wanted to say it’s illogical to point out that race is more a social construct than a scientific fact, while also addressing the impact of racism in our society. The premise is, if race doesn’t exist, then racists don’t exist and societal problems caused by racists don’t exist. That premise is absurd on the face of it, but, if you have a skewed view of society which says that people advocating for equality are all lunatics, and that either racist ideas are okay, or addressing racism is folly, then you’ve got a motive for making such a silly comparison. It’s a pretty bad premise.
The second one appears to perpetuate myths about the Benghazi thing, which have already been debunked, and it is phrased as Just Asking Questions. The OP isn’t that bad, since it actually seems to be questioning the mindset one would have to have to think that Clinton deliberately ordered no response to the attack. It’s one thing to believe career liar Hillary would have lied, I *absolutely *believe she’d say anything to serve her own self-interest, especially if she did something wrong, but here’s a case where she didn’t do anything wrong, and it’s also that there’s no self-interest being served by the narrative spun by her opponents. It doesn’t even make self-serving logical sense. On closer inspection, I am not sure this thread is even JAQing off. Seems okay.
The third one attempts to put the question to proponents of legal abortion by suggesting that it’s illogical to do anything but to ban abortions altogether or to allow them all the way up to childbirth, which essentially makes the argument that if one is squeamish about killing a fully-developed fetus during a partial birth abortion, then they should also have similar qualms about aborting when the cells are just an undifferentiated microscopic lump. There’s really no other reason to open up the topic. That suggests an ignorance of the opposing position, willful or otherwise. But it’s fine to question the reasoning or policies of one’s opponents. Other than having a misunderstanding of his apparent opposition, I am not sure I care that this thread exists.
The fourth one seems to suggest that black people shouldn’t be upset about illegal and unethical and unwarranted killings of black people who are unarmed and cooperating with police, or armed but cooperating and fully informing the officer that they were armed and made no attempt to reach for the gun, or unarmed people who are resisting arrest who are killed in situations where, if it were a white person, probably would have made it home alive. The reason they shouldn’t be upset about this is because they already live in high crime neighborhoods infested with drugs where they are likelier to be murdered than they would be in a less impoverished area, and that their murderer is likely to be from that area, and since the area is a ghetto where minorities on the margins are gathered together, the shooter might look like them in terms of skin color. It’s kind of like someone arguing that they shouldn’t be upset that they got punched in the face by one person, because they got kicked in the gut by another person. Obviously the two should cancel each other out, if the assailants are different skin colors. Or what logic are we even using here? As someone in this thread said, why aren’t they protesting and fighting against cancer instead? Cancer also kills black people. Since Black Lives Matter isn’t a group of cancer fighting scientists, they’re nothing but hypocrites. They can’t advocate for one cause affecting the group, they must advocate for all causes simultaneously or else it’s hypocrisy.
This line of thinking, and many others, is not stated outright, but it’s what I’m picking up on: That liberals base policies on their bad orthodoxy and if they could just wake up, they’d see the light. So all it takes is a really insightful bit of rhetoric and they’ll come around. It’s just that the Velocity threads are ripe with bad assumptions or poorly argued or not argued at all, and it’s up to the readers to even figure out what point Velocity is trying to make without saying it directly.
So their main crime is that they’re ineffective.
In fact, you click on these threads and you see that the OPs themselves aren’t objectionable other than the really bad premises they’re built on. But there’s a lot of fallacious thinking involved and poor reasoning in general. There’s certainly some JAQing off involved here. Particularly if this person has made so many threads.
Not all of them are bad, though.
So I was thinking if I should pit this person, and after reading all four, I felt like… no… this person has committed the crime of being apparently conservative and is using faulty premises. Some of this person’s thought patterns might make me look at them like they’re crazy, to me, but they’re otherwise not causing trouble. Then I looked to see if they were being a dick to the people they apparently disagree with, and I didn’t see that.
I saw this thread and looked at their history cited, and yeah, it seems like they create a larger number of threads than I was even aware of which begin with a poorly constructed house of cards, and it’s possible the underlying motivations for these many threads are questionable. Is it possible they’re just spamming crap threads to bait and troll the opposition? If so, it’s too subtle to be effective. It could be useful to go higher on substance and lower on the thread creation frequency, one or the other or both would be fine.
All I can see is that he apparently doesn’t understand his opponent’s reasoning very well, and has built up a lot of assumptions which are faulty. And I wonder what’s going wrong in this person’s head that could cause them to be so off-base. But if the question is one of character, it’s not a character flaw to have an opposing viewpoint. I actually kind of wonder if this person is Just Asking Questions on purpose, or they’re actually trying to create an actual debate by questioning liberal orthodoxy and they’re simply bringing some very poor assumptions to the table. Is this borderline behavior salvageable, or is it a waste of time to engage?
I don’t know, and don’t care enough to really find out. But as to the points made by Jimmy Chitwood- yeah, makes a lot of threads and doesn’t necessarily engage too much after making them. And the premises are often very poor from where I sit.
So, to Velocity, I suggest actually having a conversation at length with your political opponents as opposed to playing a gotcha game with your thread spamming. Given that you otherwise don’t seem like a dick, that might be a thread I’d like to read.
And since I’m in the pit, I’ll jazz this post up with some insults: Donald Trump is a bullshit artist and a terrible human being in general, and Hillary Clinton is a career liar who represents only the establishment and the status quo. One is worse than the other, but let’s not polish any turds.
I just pinged him via PM just in case it hasnt been done yet
Could you make this at least three times longer? I almost gave into the temptation to read it.
TIA.
Regards,
Shodan
Don’t discount the possibility that Velocity is sincere and is learning a thing or two in the process.
I know, I know…
But for real. In my experience, the way people change their minds (myself included) in these kind of message board interactions is that they disagree and give no quarter in the actual thread, but then three weeks later the next time the issue comes up, they’ve moved a little bit. Something subtle, maybe even subconscious, chews on the issue long after the thread is dead.
There are some people whose political identity is so much more about their own signaling and status than about reasoning or what happens in real life that their opinions never really move with debate. But people with heterodox opinions like Velocity tend not to be that way, in my opinion.