This thread is intended as a support group for those who are, like me, triggered by threads that commit the logical fallacy of “begging the question” in the thread title itself. I feel this is worthy of a pit thread because my initial (triggered) reaction when I see such a thread title is to assume that the poster is engaged in a subtle form of trolling, perhaps seeking to invite controversy or even a threadshit (and consequent warning) for those who would directly challenge the thread’s premise as being poorly considered/not to be taken as a given.
Actually, my premise was the opposite: That to not depict racism in such a movie would be considered racist by most people.
For instance, if someone made a movie about Robert E. Lee that showed his time at West Point, his childhood, his general leadership in the Civil War, his surrender at Apottomattox, but completely omitted all mention of his slave-owning or anything about slavery or race, such a movie might be accused of whitewashing Lee and making him look better than he was.
So my thread premise was, do such biopics necessarily have to include unflattering things in order to make the portrayal ‘complete’ and non-racist?
Your last sentence here is very confusing. It seems to require the insertion of at least one and more likely two negatives to make any sense. Having read the OP, the two possible conclusions are:
(a) to NOT depict racism is necessarily racist
or
(b) to NOT depict racism is NOT necessarily racist
But I see no begging the question in the title of that thread. Neither conclusion is stated, the main criticism I’d have of the title is that it’s just opaque, it doesn’t tell you what the question is at all.
The body of the OP lays out the actual question, which I understand to be:
If a biographical film about a racist subject focuses only on aspects of the subject’s life that are not directly related to their bigotry, and incorporates no negative commentary on their bigotry, is that inherently racist on the part of the filmmaker?
I think OP of that thread has been criticized in the past for framing questions in a dubious agenda-driven manner. But I really see no basis for that here. From what I know of @Velocity, I assume that he’s rhetorically wanting to lead us to conclusion (b) that it’s NOT necessarily racist to do this. But I really don’t see much wrong with the framing of the question.
Because in order to properly engage with that thread, one would have to first grant that there is a greater stigma against drug us in “non-western cultures” or, indeed, that there is some level of uniformity in “non-western cultures.” To say nothing of whether “western culture” exists and has a uniform take on drug use.
So much to unpack in that thread title. So many genuinely contestable conclusions taken for granted in the opening premise.
Your own OP could be said to beg the question about @Velocity’s thread.
I think if you want a continued good faith discussion of this issue - which is probably an issue worth discussing - you can’t just ignore the comments that have been made about the claimed archetypal example in your OP. If you just made a mistake and misread his thread, no big deal - but either acknowledge that or justify your position.
Okay. It certainly does happen here on the SDMB that someone will start a thread asking “Why is such-and-such the case?” only to be rightly challenged over whether such-and-such actually is the case. I know I’ve seen several examples of this.
But that’s not quite the same thing as question-begging, as I understand it. Question-begging would be arguing that such-and-such is the case, but basing your arguments on the assumption that such-and-such is the case.
The issue that @ASL_v2.0 notes in that second example would most accurately be described as asking a loaded question, I think. It’s assuming that X is true, and then asking why X happens. The same species as the classic “When did you stop beating your wife?”
Very similar to begging the question, in trying to frame the debate in a manner that entails granting an unjustified assumption.
The other common issue around here is a thread whose title asks one question or poses one issue connected to an OP body which is related, but still significantly different.
Which IMO arises from three distinct processes:
Somebody enters their title as their half-thought through sound-bite of the issue, then as they write their post they begin to actually think it through and elaborate the idea into something different without noticing how far they’ve come. They may edit the post for clarity before posting but never go back to touch up their now-inapt title.
Some people write the title last but suck at summarizing their key idea.
A catchy turn of phrase or controversial title draws more responses, even as it knowingly mischaracterizes the OP body content. So they post the catchy title and hope you’ll read the body and respond to that instead. Which, predictably, many posters just won’t do.
So which should we answer when we think we see this? IMO answer the OP body and comment about the title disconnect.
Turning to @Velocity’s racist film thread which is a bit of a hijack to this thread, but can still serve as a useful example …
An issue specifically about “racism” is in the current environment the word has a few onion-layers that really ought to have different words for them.
Person X is prejudiced and behaves badly towards people of other races.
Person Y is prejudiced and thinks badly of people of other races.
Person Z is silent about the failings of X & Y.
Person A is publicly criticizing X, Y, and Z about their failings.
Person B is outraged that person A is insufficiently outraged about the failings of X, Y, and Z. And is therefore outraged at the failings of A as well.
Person C holds that any and all mentions of of racial anything by X, Y, Z, A, or B, amounts to perpetuating the defective reasons / excuses of X & Y and therefore should / must be condemned.
Can a biopic of a racist Definition 1 person not be racist Definition 4? Can it be Definition 6 without falling into the trap of Definition 3?
IMO many of the current social justice topics, with which I generally agree, are trapped in a sort of No True Scotsman fallacy where the “good guys” are engaged in a circular firing squad of folks holding to Definitions 3 through 6 while the “bad guys” happily keep doing Definition 1 and 2 while enjoying the carnage as the 4s, 5s, and 6s tear each other to shreds.
Agreed, the problem is allowing questions as premises for debate. A premise is an argument offered in support of a conclusion. A question cannot support a conclusion, hence the fallacy you identify.
So, SDMB management should ban questions as Great Debate topics.
Not to discuss moderation here, but I actually started a thread in ATMB along similar lines a while back:
Didn’t get much support, though.
Call it question begging, call it (perhaps more accurately) a loaded question. Sometimes just the way the “question” is phrased (what it implicitly seeks to limit discussion to, and to require posters to take as true, even if they don’t) is enough to turn me off to a debate, doubly so because whoever started the thread can hide behind “just asking questions.”
I do have a tendency to simplify/shorten thread titles; it’s not because I want to mislead or JAQ but because I have a hard time tolerating thread titles that sprawl very long.
With the racist biopic example, if I were to make a title that truly represented what it was meant, I’d have to write something like “Is a biopic about a racist individual if it omits his/her unsavory aspects”, or maybe “Does a biopic about a racist have to present his/her full character in every aspect in order to be non-racist?” It would be too long, and be ugly to the eyes.
There were so many examples during the election (which some of the worst offenders probably think is still going on…). I can’t tell you how many times I avoided a thread just because the title signaled that the OP wasn’t being honest about the topic.
I admit, I was tempted to open some of those, just to see if the usual ignorance-fighters here did an epic takedown of the OP in the first few posts… but then I’d have been tempted to wade in with some bloody drawing and quartering, and that would not have been good for my blood pressure.
But then then be brief by stating the area of subject matter, and get into specifics in the post: “Portrayal of racists in biopics” or something like that.
The title you chose was not “simplified”, it didn’t make any sense. Even after reading your OP and understanding what you are asking, there is no way to parse that thread title that corresponds to what you are asking.
Agree w @Riemann. Heck the first of the OP’s two bolded second attempts make zero sense as a matter of grammar.
I’m also curious whether the OP is only interested in racists, or whether the concerns exist as applied to sexists, gender-orientationists, Fascists, etc.
Writ large there’s already a term for whitewashed or cherry-picked biographies: hagiography. Where the dividing line falls is a matter of taste. Not much more can be said.
For the record, I got that, and found it weird people were assuming your intention was the opposite. The rest of your post removed any possible ambiguity. Plus, I mean, you’d have to be an idiot to think that depicting racism as bad was pro-racism, and you’re not an idiot.
You do ask some biased questions, and maybe sometimes they come off like JAQing off, but I do tend to think you are mostly sincere in your posting. It’s why I will reply to you when I won’t reply to others, even though we greatly disagree on a lot of things.
You just sometimes don’t think through the implications of what you say. But I actually kinda enjoy pointing those implications out.