Is Shodan more retarded lately, or has he maintained a consistent level of retardation all along?

The BBQ Pit
701

For the record, I didn’t stop posting here because people were being ‘mean’ to me. I stopped because the tactics that were starting to be used against me were actually effective in the sense that they made it nearly impossible for me to participate here.

For example, a handful of posters seemed to make it their life’s work on this board to follow me around and start digging up old posts and forcing me to re-argue them, or making charges against me that I couldn’t leave unanswered, but doing so would derail the thread they decided to hijack. If I succumbed to temptation and started defending myself, it was a net negative for everyone else in the thread who had no interest in what I might have said about the space program in 2003 or some other subject that someone thought they could ‘get’ me with. If I didn’t respond, then they’d just make it worse by continually needling me in every thread I was in until they got a response. Then it would just start up again over something else.

Also, as a right-leaning poster here, when I say something I’ll often get many challenges - sometimes too many for me to be able to answer with any kind of thoroughness. Usually, it’s understood that sometimes you can’t answer every post, and if you answered someone else that had a similar argument, that would be good enough. But recently, certain people started following me from thread to thread, interjecting the conversation with tidbits like, “Before you answer that, why don’t you come back to thread A and answer my question? Huh?” And after a while, if someone would ask something of me, the same posters would interject and say, “don’t bother with him! He’ll just run away as soon as the going gets tough.”

All of this nonsense is actually against the rules, but reporting it all didn’t seem to slow it down - it just generated a lot of mod admonitions and warnings against those people.

The bottom line was that I was starting to feel that my mere presence here was a disruption, because I couldn’t enter a thread and have a discussion about just about anything without my little entourage of ankle-biters showing up and making life miserable and disrupting the thread. I don’t like being put in that situation, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to answer everyone in the more active debates, so I was somewhat in a bind.

Finally, I was sticking it out, but lately I’ve noticed the quality of debates deteriorating dramatically. Probably because the number of conservatives/libertarians around here has dwindled to the point where they are so outnumbered that these debates rapidly degenerate into either conservative/liberal bashing, or mutual back-patting fests among the liberals. Partisanship is taking over from real, substantive debate.

This became especially clear during the last round of libertarian threads. Regardless of how fringe people may think it is, it is still a serious philosophy worthy of debate, but debating anything about it has simply become impossible here because any thread about it is immediately dive-bombed by people who enter the thread solely to throw insults at anyone trying to defend it. I found that incredibly frustrating, and one day I just asked myself why I continued to put up with the nastiness and games when, at the end of it all, you couldn’t even have a serious debate anyway.

I’ve put up with the insults and the games for years, because in the end, this place still had the best group of intelligent people on the internet, and it was one of the few places that wasn’t just completely polarized on the right or the left. I rarely post on conservative message boards, because I have no interest in ‘debating’ inside an echo chamber - I have no idea why you liberals seem to prefer that, and get so bloody angry at people who have different opinion. I want to actually understand the ‘other side’, and I like having my own ideas challenged. Even just as a mental exercise, it’s healthy to put your ideas up against smart opponents. This place fulfilled that need.

Increasingly, (and restricting this comment to Great Debates only) that’s no longer true - at least for the issues I care to debate. Therefore, it stopped being worth the hassle of trying to converse with people in a hostile environment. When you get to the point where all you need to see is a thread title, and you know exactly how the debate is going to go, the positions everyone is going to take, and how it’s going to end (usually badly), what’s the point?

702

You might want to consider whether you have responsibility to actually, you know, answer people’s questions in threads you have participated in, and also, you know, whether you have an responsibility for the threads ending badly. But that would require a little ability to reconsider your past positions, I suppose.

703

OK, then prove it wrong. And given the experience of Sam Stone and Bricker and me and Debaser and Mr. Moto and every other conservative poster on the SDMB, I don’t think you can do it.

If you are going to say “not everybody does it”, that’s true. Nonetheless, there is a contingent of assholes (all liberals) who make it their business to disrupt debate.

Given that you said yourself that I get more shit than I would if I were a liberal, even if my posting style were exactly the same, I think you have a tough row to hoe to prove what you claim.

Regards,
Shodan

704

Hmm. This is pretty convincing evidence for a consistent level of retardation…

705

Aww. Poor conservatives. This thread is making me feel bad for them. You guys! Stop being so mean to the conservatives! Here, look, conservatives, you can go pass a law cutting taxes on rich people if it makes you feel better. I hate to see you looking so sad like this. I can get a blanket and some warm milk if that would help also.

706

It’s not “as a right-leaning poster” that you get all those challenges. It’s “as a reality-impaired poster”. The board isn’t really, as is often said, left-leaning, it’s factuality-leaning.

Still fancying yourself an Ayn Rand hero, are you?

Then perhaps you could actually make the case for that assertion, for what would be the very first time. The fact that you have not means you cannot, but that never seems to sink in to your ideological, factuality-impaired mind, does it? Try getting past the endless spouting of your incoherent fantasies along with your endless (and self-admitted, I must remind you) partisan cheerleading and you might actually begin to earn some respect here in the reality-based community.

[quoteI want to actually understand the ‘other side’, and I like having my own ideas challenged.[/quote]
Self-preening bullshit. There is no evidence whatever for that being the case here. Rather, when your constant stream of bullshit is pointed out, rather than accept the reality, you claim to be personally attacked and climb straight up the cross, as you are once again doing here. The problem with your interactions with others here isn’t with everyone else, it’s with your own fundamental dishonesty and irresponsibility. Try addressing that instead of looking for others to blame your problems on and you might be on the way to actual adulthood.

Now where are those WMD’s, for starters? Ready to accept that you swallowed whole and massively regurgitated even *that *lie yet? If not, can we ever expect you to?

707

IME, you do have a tendency to disappear from threads when the questions start getting a bit difficult to answer.

My advice would be: don’t spread yourself so thin. Don’t get into more debate threads than you can hold up your end of the debate in.

And yes, conservatives will be routinely outnumbered by liberals in debate threads here. It wasn’t always so; this board had a left-right balance much closer to even back in 1999-2001.

It’s your bad luck (or bad judgment, perhaps :)) to be defending conservatism in the wake of eight years when conservatives got the vast majority of their wish list checked off, and it didn’t really work out well for many people in America, or for the economy as a whole. Now is just going to be a lousy time to be defending conservatism, just the way 1980 was a pretty sucky time to be defending liberalism.

You just have to suck it up, I’m afraid, in the absence of a rule requiring quotas for equal representation of unpopular points of view. That means either jumping into fewer debate threads so you can argue them better, or having a thick skin about being criticized when you leave too many unanswered questions behind.

708

I’ll consider giving it a shot, but only if we agree on what precisely I’m trying to prove. I’m not trying to prove that conservatives don’t have more people attacking them than liberals. I’m claiming that the reaction that a particular conservative poster gets is not SOLELY due to their conservatism.

Ask yourself this… suppose tomorrow you (in violation of board rules) registered a second account with a brand new name, and on that account you argued for precisely the same positions you argue for as Shodan, but did so with a truly saintly level of politeness and forbearance, basing all arguments purely from logic, citing all claims you made, never snarking, not focusing on pointing out (perceived?) liberal hypocrisy, etc. You keep this up for a year (while continuing to post as Shodan), and at the end of that year, two people start identical pit threads, one saying “Shodan is a conservative jerk” and the other saying “(Shodan’s sock puppet) is a conservative jerk”. Do you honestly believe that the level of rancor and hatred in both threads would be identical?
(Now, obviously, we can’t really run such an experiment, but we could, if we really wanted to, look at old, closed, pit threads concerning various different conservative posters, count the number of posts of various levels of rancor and/or support, etc. If your claim is true then all conservative posters would be pitted with precisely the same level of hatred/anger/vitriol…)

709

So being a conservative in a debate prevents one from being an asshole? As far as the liberal disruptors, please name names and show examples. Your claim that it is only liberals that do this is not something that your fellow conservative posters agree with. This thread is actually about pitting a conservative poster whom other conservative posters pretty much accuse of being an asshole who makes it his business to disrupt debates. Not that I agree with that in regard to the particular poster, but we all know how often I’m just disagreed with.

710

Sam’s story is certainly one version possibly describing his history here. Another is that he came here with an agenda of pushing a particular version of political discussion, independent of reality and impervious to the facts. When too much reality piled up at odds with his predictions, i have no doubt that it became less fun to weave conservative fluff pieces for us here.

As for ankle biters following him about, he might look at it that way. A man with a modicum of personal integrity probably would not, but that has never been a characteristic of Sam’s. It’s simple - don’t make false claims, and stand up when you do.

711

Tighty-righty temper tantrum when the facts and reality overwhelm his talking points? “I’m going to take my argument and go home, and then you nasty liberal motherfuckers will miss me”? That’s my guess.

712

The experiment would be to start a sock account posting exactly as I do, same level of snark, but arguing for liberal positions and pointing out conservative hypocrisy. There would be no Pit threads for my sock. It’s not the snark to which the Usual Suspects object; it’s the politics.

If liberals on the SDMB respected thoughtful and reasonable conservatives, Mr. Moto and Bricker would never get Pitted. Sam Stone would not get followed around by the ankle biters.

Regards,
Shodan

713

Nope, never said this.

However, on the SDMB “liberal being an asshole” = “Good one!” “You really showed him!”

“Conservative being an asshole” = “NO FAIR!” “TROLLTROLLTROLL!”

Read the thread.

Regards,
Shodan

714

I will take you at your word for the period April 1999 to December 1999.

Subsequent thereto, however, I was here, and I don’t agree it was much closer to even. Somewhat closer, yes, and certainly not marred by the rancor which now exists, but even then the board leaned left. I think we had a discussion about that shortly sfter I signed on, in which I opined that the majoroty of members found the board via interest in Cecil’s column, which was published in “alternative” newspapers and thus had a readership that skewed strongly left.

715

And yet both of these propositions are denied, either implicitly or explicitly, in this very thread.

And yet I see you come to me with a request to affirm them, rather than criticize the people denying them.

True. The environment is not the result of design.

I strongly believe this is confirmation bias at work. I concede that the right is more organized than the left; I dispute that this leads to more negative results. I can’t think of a good way to quantify this proposition, though, except to observe that if two people of good faith reach such opposite conclusions, confirmation bias is probably in play. That is: I credit your observation as genuine, and hope you’d credit mine as well. Whta I believe happens is that you see liberals acting towards goals that yuou believe are good, and thus characterize their excesses and their failures of logic as less important because the cause is desirable. Similarly, you assign greater importance to right wingers’ excesses and their gaps in logic, because the results of their failures are, to your eyes, poor directions for the country to follow.

I agree.

But …

Shodan: true or false: I, a fellow conservative, have taken you to task one more than one occasion for what I saw as outright error or poor logic on your part.

716

True.

Regards,
Shodan

717

Bricker–are you actually trying to claim that liberals haven’t Pitted other liberals for the same reasons?

718

No. But – and I recognize my own confirmation bias may be in play here – to me it seems like the scales don’t balance: a liberal’s excesses have to be truly egregious before he gets Pitted here. A conservative can - and does - get slammed for relatively minor rhetorical transgressions; a liberal needs to get waaaay out at the end of Boardwalk Crazy before he gets chastised.

Indeed, MaxThheVool concedes as much when he says, “Yes, the SDMB is hostile towards conservative views, and, to a lesser extent, conservative posters.” I recognize the factors at play here at not deliberative so much as they are natural: as was pointed out earlier in the thread, each of us has a limited amount of time, and participation here should be fun, and it’s more fun to skewer a poster with whom you disagree than it is to skewer one whose principles you embrace but whose rhetorical excess has crossed some arbitrary line.

But the reason I’m posting in this thread is to try to counter, in some small way, that natural reaction by pointing out that one result of giving in to it on a regular basis will be the diaspora of conservatives from these pages.

I participate here because I don’t want to hear how valid my theories are from people predisposed to agree with me. I want to see them discussed, picked apart, by people predisposed to disagree with me; only then can they be tested meaningfully.

But is it really true that the price of admission is being called evil, racist, women-hating, or an Uncle Tom (Tomas, more accurately for me)? I’ve been called all those things here.

719

Do you need me to provide with a list of all the names I’ve been called by liberals here over the years? It’s pretty colorful, maybe more colorful than your list.

So what?

720

See, it’s responses like this that cause much of the heartache between you, Bricker, and many liberal interlocutors.

I believe absolutely that you believe this charge to be true; you believe that in actual fact liberal posters in this thread have denied that liberals ever misbehave and that the SDMB is left leaning by American standards.

The two problems this presents for you (in my view) are that a) such a belief is objectively in error, and b) it is only my opinion that you sincerely believe this, but an equally valid opinion would be that you typed a bald face lie in order to further promote the general idea that conservatives are persecuted in this venue.

Now, we both know you can pull some quotes out of this thread that could be made to appear, absent the context of the particular argumentative clauses from which you’ve excerpted them, very similar to some sort of denial of either proposition. But those quotes will actually amount merely to rhetorical diminishing of liberal rudeness (or magnification of bad conservative behavior), and rhetorical dismissiveness of the degree or importance of the leftward tilt of this board relative to world political stances or in comparison to right leaning forums.

With that in mind, perhaps you can see how arguments such as this presented frequently as critiques of liberals in general or in defense of conservatives in general would appear -to someone not inclined to attribute sincerity to your beliefs- as overtly dishonest and jerkish posting tendencies?