Must be the influence of all those folks chanting “Neener neener neener”.
Mr Moto, you’re an imbecile and a dickwad to boot.
Having said that, here, have a cookie…and share it with Shodan on the cross.
Props to Kalhoun for the great response @7.
And since a Pit thread is open, this seems like as good a place as any to bug Mr. Moto for not being able to tell the difference between my not taking a stand in favor of voting rights for current inmates, and his claim that I oppose such rights. Mr. M., not being for something doesn’t mean you’re against it.
Yeah, I was a little cryptic in my response the first time you claimed that, but I thought that you ought to be able to figure that out on your own.
Kalhoun is female? Well anyway… this is all pretty sad. To me, at least.
I do agree that the board is nastier than ever, especially in the Pit. There seems to be a push-me/pull-you conflict with conservatives. I saw comments in another thread about how poor the quality of conservatives here is, and about how we need good ones. I’m not sure how a good one would help, though, unless by good one you mean one who agrees with you… which would defeat the whole thing.
I think there’s some jumping-the-gun involved. Pouncing on a remark, casting it in the worst possible light, and then addressing that reworked interpretation rather than the original. And I think that a part of that might come from a sort of “Ha ha! We have the power now!” intoxication, but that’s not all of it. I can understand the desperation not to lose what you’ve achieved. Better to swat down these pesky conservatives lest they regroup and rebuild their power.
From one another, on the other hand, the lefts find the best possible interpretations and hold a sort of exclusive mutual back-patting discussion. Like how WONDERFUL people think post number 7 is. I do believe that were it reversed, and post number 7 was the response of a right to a left, it would be assailed as weakminded and missing the point. From my point of view, neither left nor right, it’s just a slap-down post like any other slap-down post.
With John Corrado gone, and Shodan effectively crippled by consensus, and now Mr. Moto beginning the process of disenfranchisement, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the quality of conservatives becoming worse, rather than better. Far less eloquent people will remain to take your punches, and surely that won’t be any fun. Who’s next, Bricker? God, I hope not.
Me, I’m pretty much desensitized to that sort of thing. I’ve mended a lot of fences since coming back, and I don’t care to rip it all up again. So I hope y’all will take this in the manner it’s intended — nothing more than the point of view of an outsider. No need to freak out or anything. And if you do pile-on, I’ll just go on to some other thread. It ain’t worth the hassle.
But you gotta admit. You’re not cutting the rights any slack. None. You’re not really trying to understand their point of view. You just want to make sure you win the fight. And that’s understandable because you’ve had a lot of years of very little to celebrate.
Just remember that these people are your fellow community neighbors. They’re not evil. If they worded something in a way that shocks you, just ask for clarification. The whole mindset of a right can be shocking to a left. Before you assume that a conservative automatically thinks convicts should be effectively tortured, just try to cast his comments the way you would a left.
Okay, now that I’ve wasted all this time, I’ll shut up. 
I don’t know if the boards are any nastier now than they were a year or two ago, and the Dem takeover of Congress has increased my hopes for the future. But in the present, pretty much everything bad that was going on last year continues - war, a gutted safety net, corruption in government, a major American city still largely in ruins - but a bit more light is being shined on it.
No one in their right mind expected the Dem victory last November to be more than a first step in undoing the evil of the past six years. The evil is still there, hard at work.
Really? Maybe I’m just not reading the right threads, but to me it seems more civil than ever. I do see a bit of whining by some rightists about the big bad liberal cabal, but only from a few posters, and not all that often.
Meh. It doesn’t seem to me to be significantly different from the tone of the board back in, say, 2004, when this sort of lament was going the rounds:
We’ve all had to put up with a certain amount of nasty partisan sniping from time to time, and most of us, alas, have at least occasionally given in to the temptation to commit some of it.
I tend to think that if there really is any detectable difference between now and a few years ago, it’s chiefly that some conservatives are feeling thinner-skinned because their perceived credibility in the world at large has dwindled.
When conservatives in general felt confident that their guys were doing the right things and growing in popular esteem, they didn’t care so much about being picked on by a bunch of “whiny liberals”. But now that many conservatives are feeling seriously embarrassed by the well-publicized missteps or unpopular actions of many politicians on their own team—from Katrina to the failure to stabilize Iraq to Republican sex scandals to military contractor scandals to unconstitutional detainment policies to the firing of the prosecutors, etc. etc.—being mocked by liberals flicks them on the raw more than it used to.
That’s not to say that I think conservatives in general are worse people than liberals, or that they necessarily have worse political leaders, or even that they have worse political ideas. But I think that conservative politics happens to be going through an embarrassing bad patch right now, and it makes some of our conservative posters feel more vulnerable to insults and objurgation. So they naturally think that the insults and objurgation must be getting worse than they used to be.
I read post #7 and commented positively on it because of how Kalhoun stood up for herself. For me, it wasn’t R vs L or R vs D or C vs L or whatever. Kalhoun was attacked (see thread title) and she snapped back in a clever way.
ETA: Fuck
Okay, well let’s just say that your interpretation represents reality. Stipulating that rightists are licking their wounds and being more sensitive than usual, why aren’t you toning it down? Was I right that there’s an element of “we have the power now!” revenge thing?
I’m a lefty, and I gloat when we win. You’re a libertarian, and therefore not subject to any such temptations.
That is what they mean.
SOP.
I think it is sort of a delayed reaction. Subconsciously, they are attributing the Dem victory in 2006 to the same rhetoric they spouted in 2004 (and 2002, and 2000, and 1998, and 1996, and …) It didn’t work in 2004, but that didn’t discourage them for long. Now, finally, the Dems regained ground, and they are (as you said) afraid that they might not win in 2008, and then have the whole difficult process of convincing themselves that they didn’t really lose ahead of them. This they would have to achieve (on the SDMB) by shouting in unison whenever someone dissents from the groupthink.
Again, SOP. It is easier to announce (if you are a leftie) that you have won the argument than to actually argue, since (if you are a leftie) you can count on a chorus of approval for you and derision for those of us on the Right, so long as you spout the properly approved talking points.
You can’t do that if you are not a registered Bush-hater. The conservatives (like Mr. Moto and others) are as thoughtful and intelligent as the best of the lefties, and infinitely superior to the rest. They don’t do pile-ons. If Bricker is convinced by an argument, he changes his mind. Name the last time one of the Usual Suspects did that!
I am quite sorry to have lost John Corrado, but one can only be crippled by consensus when one gives a rip. I am not naive enough to expect that any of the less thoughtful of the extremists around here are actually going to concede a point. That’s not what they do. Thus I am not crippled by any consensus.
I seek rather to gain my satisfaction from identifying when I have won the argument by my own standards. If someone throws out a straw man, and then, when called on it, retreats behind the “I was only joking” stuff that (as you say) would be derided if it came from some one not reliably left-of-center, that means that their point, such as it was, has been effectively refuted. If someone has to misrepresent your argument in order to debate it, that means that your real argument is air-tight and unassailable. And the more extreme the misrepresentation, the clearer the victory. I mean, come one - if Kalhoun has to pretend that the Constitutional clause removing voting rights from a felon is the equivalent of letting someone die because they are subhuman, then that is too ridiculous to be taken seriously. So, despite her reluctance to admit it, she doesn’t have an arguement and Mr. Moto’s point is carried by default.
Your only mistake (IMO) is that you take seriously the notion that the Usual Suspects want a higher quality of conservatives here. They don’t - they want only stupid ones, because then no one will be there to make them and their arguments look stupid. That’s part of the reason behind the pile-on and snarking at Mr. Moto in particular - they don’t want him around. He’s too smart. So the less intelligent of the Dopers on the left, those who rely on snark and ad hominems and dishonesty and sheer annoyance factor, cluster to the attack like flies to sugar.
God forbid.
But you are correct, it won’t be any fun for those who value intelligent conversation. But for those who merely want the sort of circle-jerks that most political threads turn into once someone mentions Bush, that will be lots of fun.
I have come to believe they aren’t even reading anything beyond the first sentence or two.
Can’t make someone understand if they don’t want to. So I get my kicks where I can.
Thanks for the outsider’s point of view.
Regards,
Shodan
Just wait till the leftists realize they didn’t really win. The Democrats won, and there’s a difference – they’re not taking their marching orders from elucidator, anyway. (And I’ll just say that it would be a more picturesque crusade if they were.)
Not to mention that it was just a good post. Such things tend to invite comment. A good post is not necessarily a secret liberal rallying point.
Who’s this “they” you’re talking about? And got any proof? Telling Moto his pitting is lame is not the same as saying we don’t want him around. Heck, you could probably even get him to admit his pitting is lame. The fact that the conversation wandered as abruptly as it did from the point of the pitting is proof enough that the pitting has precious little traction.
Me personally? I like to think that I’m one of the polite ones, at least most of the time, but if you tell me I’ve been failing to live up to that, I’ll try to be more careful.
Or Doper liberals in general? Welllllll…can’t speak for anybody else, of course, but it does seem to me that the idea of toning down one’s insults because one’s political opponents are feeling more vulnerable than usual due to real-world setbacks and failures is…something of a novel proposition for these boards, to say the least.
Not that it doesn’t sound like a good idea that would make us all better people, mind you. Just that it’s never been tried before, and we’ll probably have to give Dopers of all political stripes a little time to get used to the concept.
And the reason it has little traction is that Mr. Moto is not a registered Bush-hater. Thus he does not have the built-in chorus of assholes (hi, RedFury!) to chime in to support him and deride whoever he Pits.
You did read my post, didn’t you?
Oh, that’s right - I forgot.
Regards,
Shodan
There there, Shoday, there there. It’s not easy being a martyr, is it?
The Evil Liberals of Shodan’s imagination.
Honestly, some of the complaints by some of the conservatives on this board of late have been rather surreal. The accusation that not one liberal would actually debate the issues makes me wonder what Shodan has been smoking. The accusation of some liberal hive mind makes me think it must be pot, because that’s some serious paranoia going on there.
Awww…didn’t get your cookie, did you? Mean, mean, Mr Moto, kept it all to himself. 
Yup. Gonna take a little time to get used to the concept…