Pick one that we can work with. How tough can it be? They are ubiquitous, according to you. He does it all the time. So – pick one. Indulge me.
See, Bricker, for me it’s not quite this simple, and for much the same reason that i’m generally happy to refer to Starving Artist as “dishonest” even when he’s not actually lying about specific, discrete factual issues. He doesn’t so much “refuse to accept” factual or evidence-based arguments, as to glide right by them as if they had no bearing on reality.
The thread that comes to mind where this attitude of his first really crystallized for me was an extended discussion about the death penalty that we had some five years back.
The first post of our long exchange is here, but i warn you that if you really want to follow the whole thing and see why i find him so obtuse and unwilling to debate reasonably, it will require quite a lot of reading. The exchange really goes all the way to the last page of the thread.
That thread really shows how a reliance on “I remember…” trumps broader notions of evidence and historical understanding in SA’s worldview, and it demonstrates how he tends to conflate beliefs and evidence as if they were the same thing, and should be compared directly and weighed in the same manner. If you do decide to plough through it all, witness how he fails to grasp the distinction between “people felt safer” back in the 1960s, and “people were safer” back in the 1960s.
Like I said, you’re a liar.
Nothing in that post says I’m against book learning. It merely makes the perfectly obvious and correct statement that a book is only as good as the integrity of its contents.
And this is the kind of thing, Bricker, that people seize upon around here and accept as gospel. Months from now I’ll probably still be hearing about how Princhester proved that I admitted I was against ‘book learnin.’
Or, Bricker, when he simply states that a credible analysis is not possible for things like teen pregnancy figures. With a swoop of his mighty intellect, he dismisses research and analysis that seems to pass muster with quite a few intelligent folks.
Therefore he seems to conclude that when people cite figures from reliable sources that teen pregnancies have dropped since the '50s, he can simply ignore them.
The really laughable part is that he gives as his reasoning for not believing that teen pregnancies have dropped since the 1950’s as
Like teens in the 1950’s were NOT EMBARRASSED OR SHAMED over a pregnancy compared to today? Huh? The logic circuits do not work.
You are quite right in this regard. Generally speaking I do glide right by them. And the reason is that I learned early on here that most of the so-called cites that get posted come from biased sources, usually with a certain agenda, and often falling considerably short of proving what they purport to prove. Two recent examples come to mind. The first is Princhester’s contention that I’m ‘agin’ book learnin,’ in a very deliberate attempt to portray me as some backwoods farmer from the old west who doesn’t believe in schooling and wants to keep his kid on the farm. This despite my numerous complaints here about how liberal beliefs and practices put to work in the educational system has screwed it up and resulted in kids graduating high school and working their way through college (and I’m assuming these are the achievers) with spelling, grammar and other language skills that wouldn’t have cleared the fifth grade by the standards of most of the twentieth century.
I discussed this very thing by email with Steve Wozniak about ten years ago. He was working as a teacher at the time and we were talking about various things (he was great at that time about answering any and all emails; it nearly destroyed his marriage in the wake of a TV movie called Pirates of Silicon Valley or something like that) and that subject came up. Online services such as America Online and Compuserve were very popular then and I happened to notice that if a person could punctuate and spell properly it was a dead giveaway that they were thirty-five or older. I asked Wozniak what he thought were the reasons for this. He blamed it on lack of funding, and I thought too highly of him to try to engage him in a debate about what is almost certainly the real reason, which is actually twofold: one, that liberals in the educational system decided that failing kids harmed their self-esteem and made them feel badly about themselves, and so they began to be passed from grade to grade whether they learned the subjects or not; and two, in the wake of forced bussing, it was rightly determined that urban and ghetto kids, due to their environment, weren’t disciplined in studying and either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up. So, instead of trying to find some way to motivate them and bring them up to speed, or in developing other classes designed to bring them along more gradually, the answer was to dumb things down so everything was ‘fair.’ And so now we have kids virtually doomed to life at the low end of the economic scale – and therefore more prone to lives of deprivation and crime – than would have been the case had they been made to learn in order to pass.
The second example of how specious “proofs” are unthinkinly accepted around here if the favor the liberal view can be found in the recent thread ruminating about various methods of execution, where Fear Itself posted a cite to prove that states without the death penalty had lower murder rates than those with the death penalty – this ostensibly to disprove the notion that the death penalty was a deterrent. Cite here.
But we can see by scrolling down to the graph showing murder rates for the non death penalty states vs. the death penalty states, that the comparison is ridiculous and that the difference obviously has nothing to do with the death penalty. Does it really come as a surprise to anyone that states like Vermont and Maine and Massechuetts are going to have lower murder rates than states like California, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana, all of whom have large areas where the population is densely packed and crime-ridden and whose criminal culture has spread to and impacted other areas of the state as well? Of course not, and yet this is exactly the kind of thing that is blindly accepted around here that proves conclusively that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent and ol’ Starv is a dumbass for thinking it does, because that’s how things were done in the fifties. :rolleyes:
Now, as a matter of fact I have glided past cites purporting to show this in the past. The reason? I simply knew better. Even small children know that the worse the punishment, the more unlikely the action. This is also obvious even in our traffic penalties, where an illegal lane change draws a significantly lower penalty than speeding in a school zone or driving recklessly. So I know, despite what some alleged cite says, that the death penalty is a deterrent, and I know that whatever cite purports this not to be the case is flawed. I also know that I don’t want to get bogged down in endless discussion of the merits of the cite, so yeah, I blow it off.
I can’t recall a time in which I stopped and took the time to examine a cite that purported to prove I was wrong about something only to find out that it did no such thing. (Other than minor misstatements and errors in spelling and grammar, that is – in which case so far as I know I’ve always acknowledged both the cites and the errors.)
Bricker, i humbly submit this as Prosecution Exhibit A-2, to be attached to the thread i linked above.
Ubiquitous? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
In any case:
He’s referring to this,* and is explaining to us how, even when someone provides him with documented evidence, he knows from his own observation that the evidence MUST be wrong, because it doesn’t jibe with what he *knows *to be true.
*Click back through FinnAgain’s links for reverse-chronology history of SA’s insistance that, documentary evidence notwithstanding, he just KNOWS that teen pregnancy is worse today than it was in the 50s.
ETA: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11723023&postcount=266
I know, I keep meaning to make this point whenever this comes up: that he’s arguing against himself here.
They certainly were, which makes 1950s statistics questionable too. You are presuming an exact tit-for-tat percentage of discrepancy between the two sets of statistics and there is no reason to believe that is so. Reporting methods are different now, HIPAA laws are in effect now, abortions are widely available now, etc., etc.
So what we’re left with is the fact that there is no way to reliably compare the two and come up with an accurate answer.
I can tell you though that in the 1950s there were no schools with a 25% STD rate among high school females, and that no high schools existed anywhere where one in every seven or eight girls were pregnant. Cite (And this is despite widespread sex education and the easy availability of birth control. I’m guessing the rate would be more like six or seven out of eight otherwise.)
I can guarantee you shit like this wasn’t going on in the fifties!
It’s perfect, isn’t it?
When the available evidence doesn’t comport with Starving Artist’s view of the world, it is unreliable, and there’s just no way to be sure.
But when one single piece of evidence supports SA’s hidebound prejudices and personal crusades, he can “guarantee you” that his interpretation of the evidence is the correct one.
You just cannot make this shit up (although he does his best).
And you would carefully examine, no doubt, cite after cite alleging that 2 + 2 = 9.3, or that cars burn mineral oil instead of gasoline?
There is no point in wasting time on cites that are obviously wrong to begin with. I’ve yet to see a cite on a major issue that proved I was wrong, and yet people accept them as gospel and people like lissener run around here for months afterward claiming I’ve had my ass handed to me.
See? Dishonesty and misdirection right out of the box. Nowhere did I say that the Robeson pregnancy statistics prove anything other than what I said, which was that shit like that wasn’t happening in the fifties. Which it wasn’t.
You are the one claiming I guarantee one piece of evidence supports all my contentions, not me.
lissener, for all his faults, is basically a good guy who is struggling with the things I say that make him unhappy, and trying in vain to understand the reason for them. You, on the other hand, are simply a mean-spirited, manipulative, deliberately deceptive asshole, and one who delights in being so, as you have admitted yourself (being an asshole, that is).
But see, you miss the entire point of why objective cites are necessary. To you, it’s perfectly “logical” that the death penalty MUST be a deterrent, therefore any proof to the evidence MUST be wrong.
But I disagree. Even without proof, I don’t believe that it’s a deterrent. My reasoning is twofold. First, if you’re in the state of mind that you’re ready to literally kill someone, how likely is it that–in that moment–you’re going to stop and coldly think. "Hmm, there will be consequences to this . . . " etc. No, that’s not very likely is it? Your state of mind is FAR more likely to be, “FUCK the consequences, this dude fucked my wife” or whatever. Think about it, SA, someone who thinks murder is a viable option is not going to be thinking, in general, the way you or I do. Plus, in that moment, even if they do consider the consequences, they’re just as likely to bet on the possibility of getting away with it. (People do you know 
. What? I’m just sayin. ) In any case, for THAT person, in THAT moment, with his finger on the trigger and his enemy in front of him, I don’t think the intellectual process of “deterrence” is all that relevant.
Second, I honestly believe there’s a psychosocial cost to having the death penalty: I think it subconsciously suggests a darker, more dangerous world, where the killing of a human being is a valid choice. I think it acts, psychologically, as a counter-deterrent, in other words. I think that for people in that state of mind, it acts as a subconscious encouragement. That’s what explains those statistics to me.
In any case, this has been a thought experiment to demonstrate, SA, why empirical evidence is necessary, because two different people will have two different ideas of what is “obviously” true.
So for you to say “The reason? I simply knew better. Even small children know that the worse the punishment, the more unlikely the action.” is, quite simply, unacceptable in the context of a serious discussion. (Plus it shows you’ve never met a small child.)
Population density, in persons per square mile (ranking among the states):
Massachusetts - 809.8 (3)
Mississippi - 60.6 (32)
“large areas where the population is densely packed”
Boston, MA - 12,561/sq mi
Worcester, MA - 4,678.1/sq mi
Springfield, MA - 4,737.7/sq mi
Lowell, MA - 7,500.9
Cambridge, MA - 15,767.96/sq mi
Jackson, MS - 1,657/sq mi
Gulfport, MS - 1,231/sq mi
Hattiesburg, MS - 909.0/sq mi
(figures taken from Wikipedia, sourced to various pages at the U.S. Census Bureau.)
And you misspelled “Massachusetts”.
I wonder if we could ask that **Starving Artist **simply attach the following as a signature to every post he makes, in order to save anyone unfamiliar with him the trouble of responding:
Jesus tittyfucking Christ.
Bricker I really hope you’ve been paying attention to these last dozen posts or so. Examine SA’s modus operandi for a few moments in the cold light of day. Do you truly, honestly believe that people can be more persuaded to your worldview by your defending his style of posting?
Proving what?
Are there ghettos and projects in Vermont on a scale you find in states like California, Louisiana, Texas, etc. by population density? Are there criminal cultures in Vermont that are proportionate to its population density? Drugs? Drive-by shootings? A criminal culture as widespread by population density? Is there as widespread a criminal culture there as in these other states?
More dishonest verbal sleight-of-hand. What a surprise!
Ooooohhhh, you lying ass bitch.
That your suppositions and assertions are not based on facts.
You know, I remember once a long time ago there was a language thread, and I made some comment about how the second syllable in the word pronounciation isn’t pronounced like the word noun. It was an example in service of some larger point that I cannot recall now. When it was pointed out to me that pronunciation isn’t actually spelled like that, thereby undermining my point, I am thankful I had enough intellectual honesty to go “Oh. I was wrong about that,” instead of acting like you do here.
This is, perhaps, the most perfect example of why everyone thinks you’re a dishonest idiot.
Your claim was:
and now you claim that the Robeson pregnancy statistics support your assertion that “shit like this wasn’t happening in the fifties.”
But the Robeson incident does no such thing. Show me one place where that article about the Robeson incident tells us anything at all about the fifties. One place. Go on, i challenge you. All the article about Robeson tells us about is what happened at Robeson in 2009. It is not, in any way, evidence about what did or did not happen in the 1950s. Either you are the most dishonest person alive, or the dumbest. There’s no other explanation for the way you argue.
Bricker, can you truly tell me that you’re not yet convinced?