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.
