You sound a lot like Der Trihs, your opinion should be taken as fact without supporting evidence. You know, like Republicans.
Modeator note Take this to another forum, not About This Message Board.
MODERATOR NOTE: Stop it with the snark. Not appropriate in this forum nor in this thread.
This may be the worst case of thread creep I’ve ever seen.
Nm
The thing is, Der Trihs sincerely holds his beliefs. And not only does he really believe the things he posts, he considers them obvious. So when he says that George Bush invaded Iraq because he wanted to kill brown people or Anti-abortion advocates are motivated by a desire to see women suffer, that to him should be no more controversial than saying pro athletes are physically fit, or that scientists are generally of above average intelligence. In other words you’re asking him to tone down over the top remarks that he cannot see as over the top.
So I see three choices for him:
—Voluntarily stop posting in GD
—Keep posting as he does, and eventually get banned
—Or, as you suggest, pretend to be someone he isn’t and to hold beliefs he doesn’t hold.
I’m not thinking any of those are good options for him.
NB, I think his views are often extreme and ill-conceived. I’m just trying to look at the picture from his perspective.
Never mind
But the thing is, it doesn’t take much effort to tack on a few restrictive clauses and extenuating phrases, and it comes out to much the same thing, and perfectly okay. e.g., “There was far less reluctance to invade Iraq because of the racial and ethnic distance between them and most Americans; the Congress would have been much more reluctant to allow a war against a mostly white or mostly Christian nation.” Gets most of the point across, from behind a fig-leaf of a non-falsifiable hypothetical.
This kind of qualification is a necessary tool to learn to use in general discussions and debates. I’m all for people saying what they believe…but wrap it in a shroud of diplomacy and it’s less likely to be directly offensive.
Agreed!
Der could have easily pointed out the same Americans who enthusiastically backed the invasion of Iraq had the completely opposite reaction when Israel, in recent years, twice invaded the white Christian nation of Lebanon.
Der could have reminded us all of the massive protests against these and how Cheney, Bush and their neocon supporters were all outraged by the invasions.
Of course, I think we all know how such an argument would have turned out.
Lebanon is not a Christian country.
But I don’t think it would be as simple as you guys think for DT to change his posting, if he really believes what he says. It’s not just a matter of throwing a few qualifiers in here and there, especially since much of what posts is factually incorrect.
Not seeing a whole lot of difference between:
*Gun owners would cheerfully sacrifice their own children in order to keep their guns.
*
-and-
Many Gun owner would cheerfully sacrifice their own children in order to keep their guns.
Heh.
That claim could be presented as an hypothesis and discussed in a full paragraph. I will note that the sort of retooling in this hypothetical or the retooling advocated by Ibn Warraq or Trinopus requires some combination of effort, intelligence, memory, articulateness, time and wordsmithing. It’s not easy. Also, such a process tends to necessarily moderate or at least offset extreme positions. I’ve done this a couple of times with selected Der Trihs posts. One asserted Republican intransigence, the other characterized 19th and early 20th century white supremacists IIRC. I respectfully part company with Trinopus regarding the contention that the process doesn’t take too much effort (with some admitted exceptions). I agree that it is, “a necessary tool to learn to use in general discussions and debates,” if one wants to conduct best practices.
Perhaps a little off-topic, but maybe helpful to some posters who are asked to give more cites.
Der, I want you to stick around and I often agree that things you post are bleedin’ obvious so that finding a cite seems silly. (And sometimes I don’t, like when you say women are out get men on rape charges.) But apparently people need evidence to understand that opposition to abortion is related to wanting to see women suffer for their sins, so help them out.
Get some reference management software! You’ll love it, I promise! I use Zotero, but there are loads. It works in your browser and can also work with your word processor. Whenever you find an article that relates to a subject you like, immediately click the button. That’s all, one button right there in your browser. You can keep different files with different cites, eg “Republicans hate women”, “Republicans hate brown people”, “Christianity is incompatible with morality”, “women want to get men on rape charges”. Every time you find an article (or youtube vid or power point or film) you just click, and it saves it automatically. Then when someone asks for a cite, you go to your reference manager, pick out the ones that are relevant and drop them right in the thread.
It’s just a small part of all the stuff in this thread, but it might help with some of the criticism you get.
But yeah, if Republicans wanted a word other than Conservative to describe their own position, it would probably be intransigent. It’s not only inoffensive and accurate, “I am intransigent” would make them a proud slogan to go with the elephant. In fact, our own Master tells us the elephant means Republicans are “unmovable”. :smack:
I once used Delicious, but moved to Diigo when the former changed business models. They are online bookmarking websites with Firefox plugins. Another online tool is Pocket, for articles you want to bring to the board later.
Nice point gracer. This probably deserves its own thread.
No, of course not. But how about “Many gun rights advocates seem to favor their abstract legal rights more highly than the safety of their own children.”
Throw out the “cheerfully sacrifice” shit – I absolutely despise this kind of language! Stick to a claim that – wrong or right – is a legitimate rhetorical viewpoint. It avoids straw-manning and false personal characterization. It says pretty much the same thing, but is not intrinsically fallacious. (I’m not saying it’s true; just suggesting a less trollish way of phrasing it.)
Well, you’d cheerfully sacrifice content in favor of laziness… (((JOKING!)))
Like anything, diplomatic phrasing of one’s viewpoints improves with practice. (Alas, I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s hard for me to make a direct declarative statement without a cloud of terms and conditions!)
I’d never heard of these! Gotter look into 'em! Thank you! And, yeah, guys, an IMHO thread, please!
How about “In the face of so many children dying by guns, it is unfathomable that gun owners remain committed to fighting simple restrictions that don’t affect the fact that they can still easily own, carry and buy more guns!!!” ? or something similar
It gets the point across without the hyperbole. So much is wrapped in your example (and I’m not sure if it is a direct cite or not, but it’s close enough) such as:
-
It accuses gun owners of not arguing in good faith. They don’t earnestly believe that gun control does not reduce crime; they know it does but have ulterior motives.
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Gun owners would hold this position if it affected their own children, as opposed to an abstract realization that it affect other children.
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If given the choice a priori, they would still allow their own children to die.
-
They would do it cheerfully.
#1 is a fair topic for debate (although, wrong IMHO), but #2 through 4 are just firebombs that are unverifiable, provocative, and unnecessary. They are such strong charges that without proof they are simply insults and shouldn’t be tolerated.
Your proposed wording is a completely different point. #2 is especially important for the original statement, that even if their own children were in the crossfire, they still would support gun ownership over safety. And the thing is, stated that way, it’s true for some of them. Now the thing is the line “cheerfully sacrifice” almost suggests they would walk their children out into the parking lot or public square and blast them in the head to prove their point, and that is certainly hyperbolic and inflammatory. But the thing is, for the people being discussed, their argument is not more gun control, it’s more guns. Their children at risk from gun violence is a necessary evil, the alternative being their children at risk from gun violence and not having guns to defend their children.
I’m not trying to make this a forum on gun control positions. Rather, the point is that some people find inflammatory statements are necessary for framing the argument to try to show the hypocrisy/futility/stupidity/callousness/whatever of that argument. It runs the risk of strawmanning, but done well, it serves to highlight the flaws in an argument. Satire is a well-respected form of rhetoric.
My point is that your effort to rewrite Der Trihs’s arguments changes the argument to the point of being a completely different position.
This thread is really going off in different directions … which is not a bad thing per se, just that it’s not really appropriate to About This Message Board
Topics that are better served in different fora should go there. You can link to those new threads here if you like, but develop them elsewhere, please.