Here’s the story. You are not going to use your opinion regarding any group to insult others on this message board through association. It’s been done before and t won’t be tolerated. At best, if another poster openly claims to be a bigot - as an example - you may ask them about their admission. But outside of that you are never justified in using a group association to tar another poster.
I won’t get into percentages as that’s a fools game.
As To, said above, do not assume that your opinions are fact. Those who do so inevitably go wrong in debates.
If they openly claim they are a bigot, then can I call them that?
Also, and this may be a slippery slope but I figure I’ll ask it anyway, if someone says they are a white supremacist, without claiming bigotry, meaning they justify it somehow like they just happen to like whites more, then even though they didn’t claim semantically to be a bigot, can I still call them that?
I think despite the welcoming friendliness towards all sides you want to present here, there are things on this board held as facts because they are facts. Evolution, global warming, the sky is blue, that kind of thing. If someone comes in here saying that evolution is the work of Satan and is false, can we start calling them names? Or are we to allow even those people the appearance of legitimacy? And if you say yes we should be kind to even those types of people, then one final question: how is the fighting of ignorance served by pretending all sides have some validity? Shouldn’t we have a list of things that we’re all freely able to ridicule because people who believe in them deserve nothing less than mockery?
You may not mock or call names toward other posters - outside the pit - under any circumstances. Insults of any kid are simply not allowed. I want you - right now - to understand that arguing for what circumstances allow you to insult others is a losing game. Much more of it and this thread will be closed.
I expect that posters in GD have the fine ability to demolish other’s argument they find nonsensical without resorting to name calling and so forth. If you can’t do so I again encourage you to stand back and reconsider your debating strategy.
I wouldn’t say he’s a focus by White People generally but when it comes to some people, in whatever color of the rainbow. I was saying the rhetorical question being asked and the sayings from my last post where by angry people, in a mostly conservative page, calling Al a douche.
I will say this statement seems like another opinion as I have seen multiple White people rearing their heads in Internet rage when Sharpton shows up, but Al is not the focus of all White people, so I will say it’s just the matter of perception.
Even taking that article at face value - which would be silly, since it’s the Post - its content has almost nothing to do with that claim. At worst, it suggests Sharpton is basically a lobbyist.
At best – meaning if you don’t believe the article “since it’s the Post” – then he’s a lobbyist. Taking the content at face value, it exactly supports the claim in the headline.
What the article says is that Sharpton protested some companies, his organization received donations, and then the protests stopped.
What the article does not say is whether the companies made other changes at the same time that justified ending the protests.
People like you will assume they did not, and therefore infer that the headline is justified. People who are used to the Post’s race-baiting will be more skeptical.
So, do we know whether Honda changed anything else in 2003, for example?
That sounds like lobbying, unless the only thing the companies did was give him money – did GM close the AA owned dealership? Did Honda change its hiring practices? If they did, then he was quite successful in inducing change in these companies.
You would think if Sharpton was able to extract concessions from Honda and other entities where protests stopped after making donations that NAN would laud those as part of their accomplishments. There is no evidence that any concessions were made other than donations to enrich Sharpton. Given the rest of Sharpton’s past, you can draw your own conclusions on what most likely happened. It has nothing to do with what news outlet writes the story.
Sharpton is a tax cheat, and generally seems to be a race baiting asshole. Disparaging the Post is fine - they are not exactly a bastion of high class journalism. The NY Times has laid out pretty scathing criticism of Sharpton as well on different fronts.
Maybe they do. How much attention do you pay to what accomplishments NAN is lauding?
I wouldn’t be surprised if Sharpton extracted some concessions from these corporations. But the question is whether a company can get by with concessions alone or whether paying off Sharpton is a big part of the settlement.
There is no evidence in the Post article. I wouldn’t conclude that there is no evidence generally. My 2 minute investigation revealed that Honda starting donating to historically black colleges in large amounts that year too. I’ll bet if I put a real reporter on it, she’d dig up other changes too.
No. You can only draw conclusions with what you are presented, and you cannot trust the Post to present you with a full picture. For all we know, Honda also donated to NAN before that incident. If you would trust the Post to report that, then you don’t know much about them.
None of this is an across-the-board defense of Sharpton. He may well be a scoundrel, but that doesn’t make every conservative rumor about him true.
If you’re predisposed to believe it, you will interpret ambiguous evidence in one way. If you had no predisposition either way, you’d more clearly see that the evidence is not very persuasive without more information.
I agree that the evidence is not completely persuasive without more information.
My post to which you responded was a response to RNATB. His claim was “Even taking that article at face value - which would be silly, since it’s the Post - its content has almost nothing to do with that claim. At worst, it suggests Sharpton is basically a lobbyist.”
My reponse was: “At best – meaning if you don’t believe the article “since it’s the Post” – then he’s a lobbyist. Taking the content at face value, it exactly supports the claim in the headline.”
It sounds like you’re just saying that you personally don’t take the content at face value because it’s the Post, which does not contradict what I wrote.
As I said initially, it’s “nothing really new to those who have followed his career, but some detail”.
No, that’s incorrect. I am saying that the “face value” of their allegations do not amount to proving their headline.
I suspect you have some idiosyncratic definition of face value. But to most of us, it means that if you accept the things stated as true, then the conclusion follows. It might not follow as a matter of logical necessity, but the inference will be quite strong.
Here, if you accept their facts as true, the conclusion is only weakly established. And that’s because The Post does not give us a lot of important information, such as whether Honda previously donated to NAN, or whether Honda made other substantial changes at that time. Without those pieces of information, all you have is a weak temporal inference that you would probably reject in other contexts as sufficient to prove the claim.
It shouldn’t be that hard to find some of the needed information, though I couldn’t find it in a cursory google search. Was the AA owned GM dealership closed? Did Honda do anything about their hiring practices?
To the contrary, it appears that you have an idiosyncratic definition of “face value”. Specifically it appears that you’re using “face value” to mean “accurate”. But that’s not what the term means.
The term commonly means "the superficial appearance or implication of something, which in this case would support the claims about Sharpton. What you’re doing is suggesting there might be more to the story, but that’s not taking things at face value under the commonly accepted definition of the term.