The next time we see something solid will be the first. There is “other evidence” that the earth is flat, too.
Yeah. Sure. Right.
Perfect example *here * of a complaint that the board is unfair and unbalanced simply because all possible viewpoints are not given equal respect regardless of their degree of basis in reality.
This board is not skewed toward “the left” (even allowing for use of such a caricatured, ignorance-promoting term), but toward fact. Toward thought. Toward fighting ignorance. This is good.
Did the reasoned argument include your claim that it was perfectly unbiased for a news organization to identify conservative think tanks as “conservative,” but fail to identify liberal think-tanks as “liberal,” because conservative think tanks exist to provide rationalizations and liberal think tanks exist to reach to unvarnished truth?
Or was that something else?
Tom’s smarter than I. If that indeed was your point, in was too subtle for me catch without a roadmap.
Indeed, the worst I have been able to figure out that we can accuse Bush of on this front is the same thing 99% of all humans do every day (particularly in GD), and apply their own predetermined outlook of the world onto what information comes in. If it meshes with their opinion then it is proof, and if it does not then it is faulty because of reasons X, Y, an Z.
Unless you think he was sending over little black bags of cash and women’s underclothing to the CIA so that they would manufacture evidence for him.
Something else. While I believe I was correct in making that claim, it was not really provable, besides by dint of experience. You seemed to be saying on that thread that you could prove that NPR was biased. People tried to show you how you could how no such thing, since you are seeing only what you want to see, and not the actual facts of the case, as well as how full of holes your “evidence” was. They gave quite reasoned responses to your claim, but instead, prior to my statement, you went off and insisted that they were not doing exactly what they were doing, but instead, [del]rhetorical[/del] logical trickery.
In this thread, **Stoid offers an article in support of a theory that’s favorable to the left.
By my count, less than 20 posts, out of seventy-five in the thread, discuss the merits of the article’s claim; less than ten examine the flaws in the author’s assumptions.
If this board were truly devoted to neutral fighting of ignorance, then that thread would resemble the sort of pile-on trainwreck that we’ve all come to know and love.
But because the conclusions urged by the OP are palatable to the majority here, there’s very little attack of the methodology and reasoning.
In contrast, detailed parsing of President Bush’s claims concerning intelligence about Iraq is par for the course. And I agree with that - skeptical inquiry is an excellent method for discovering the truth.
if 30% of all Dopers are assholes (to pull a figure at random), and a thousand Dopers, of whom 900 are left-wing and 100 are right-wing, then liberal assholes outnumber conservative assholes by 27 to 3.
But don’t worry, I will always be here to try to make up the difference on volume.
No, what I am saying is that the two groups of lefties and Bush-haters overlap but are not identical, and that the group of Bush-haters is larger than the lefties.
Yes, there is. The OSP coupled with the downing street memo is proof.
They decided to go to war first and then to ‘fix’ the facts around their desire.
They set up a rogue intel agency whose job was to take mostly rejected intel and spin it into a “convincing” case.
All of our standard intel agencies were telling them it was false, but the administration put pressure on, and in some cases outright fired, those who disagreed. In some cases the administration presented information to the nation/world that they knew was false. Yellow cake. Meetings in Prague. Etc…
This song and dance would not have been necessary if they’d had the truth.
Give proof or retract. Where is this ‘counter evidence’?
I’d hoped to have ilk
And, yep, drawing correct conclusions from well proven facts is simply beyond the pale. Why, even when the CIA was telling them that the sources they had were liars and they were using the OSP to gather rejected intel they, um… help me out here Bricker, how you planning on spinning that one?
Anybody else ever get the feeling that some Bush apologists would require a signed confession written by Bush in an Iraqi child’s blood before they’d begin to consider it a possibility, and then argue that it was only an ‘interpretation’ of the facts?
No, Bricker, I’m sorry, but this is proof in the truest sense of the word. How many ‘smoking guns’ do we need before Bush loses his apologists?
Sage Rat: poor form. No, no bags of cash for the CIA, because the CIA was telling him it wasn’t true.
While I still think that Sam would have been better off withholding his observation until the evidence was provided in this thread, you guys certainly have not wasted much time proving his point.
A claim that the board does not skew Left because it skews toward fact and thought is both silly and insupportably arrogant. Facts and thought are not solely the domain of the Left and claims, even by implication, that they are do nothing to promote the fight against ignorance.
This board has no obligation to be “fair and balanced” in regards to discussions of a political nature. The board does not recruit, or even encourage, people to post; we all do it of our own volition.
However, I do, in part, agree with this:
I signed up as a guest in May, shortly before there was a fee to use the boards. In that brief time, I believe that I have seen the number of conservative viewpoints on the boards diminish.
By instituting a fee this board became a de facto private club. That, in itself, will encourage exclusions. When potential new members come to visit, for example, and see that the majority of posts are left-wing, potential right-wing members will exclude themselves, since the values they espouse are (as far as they can see) rejected by the current populace of the forum. Who among us would pay to be a part of a club who’s membership is diametrically opposed to our positions and goals?
Eventually, this will result in not just a slant, but an actual membership majority which holds (mostly) the same viewpoint.
And that won’t fight ignorance. It might make everyone on that particular side feel good, but it won’t fight ignorance.
Not even then, I think. Lets say fifty years from no, Bush’s biography (printed on human skin, with the blood of Iranian children) admits he knew damn well what he was doing, we will hear so much fucking spin about how he was right to have done so, or how it isn’t that big a deal.
Well, there’s certainly an argument to be made that a reasonable review and weighting of the extant intelligence would have caused a neutral, intellectually honest analyst to conclude there were no WMDs.
I think it’s also a credible scenario that there was conflicting evidence, and that the Bush administration chose to credit the evidence that supported thier viewpoint - just as people do on this board when discussing Diebold’s various alleged perfidities. And those folks may reasonably reply: “Yes, but starting a war is SO serious that he should have been completely sure!”
True or not, it shifts away from the original goalpost: “Bush lied!”
I think there’s a very strong case to be made for “The Bush administration screwed up.” I believe there’s a weaker case to be made for “Bush lied!” The matter is certainly not PROVEN, in any event.
I disagree, not in fact, but in spirit. I see republicans come in here, sure that irrefutable facts prove their point, and that the democrats are just being willfully ignorant. Soon, they find that while the democrat’s arguments are not the straw men parodies show on cable news, and that their (the republican, that is) own arguments are just examples of The Big Lie technique.
So, which one is “more true”? The democrat, who can put an issue in context, and show how their opinion is the best solution? Or the republican, who argues against strawmen?
Certainly. It is also not what I said. I never stated *or implied * the “because” you falsely attribute to me. There is not necessarily any causality relationship at all.
The board does skew toward fact and thought, yes. I hope you agree. The results follow. That is good.
Thanks in advance for pulling down that strawman. Bricker, it isn’t about “evidence” now, but “credible scenarios”? Tell us more about this “proof” stuff, do.
Tell me; at the end of the day, what is it that you Conservatives want? As far as I can tell, on these boards, your assholes are just as obnoxious and plentiful as our assholes. You do just as crappy a job at policing them as we do. So what do you want?
