It’s a valid angle if a few conditions are met: the religious person has to be arguing in a certain way for a certain brand of religion, you have to be smart enough to apply it correctly, and you have to take it seriously if it’s a serious discussion. Carl Sagan used the concept well as the dragon in his garage.
Yes! I saw that about 3 minutes after the first time I ever read the BBQ Pit and though, “heh. that’s clever” - and I’ve seen it at least once a week since then. I also get a kick out of when people write, “I fell right on my a**” or somesuch.
YES! I cannot count how many times I’ve started a thread about a Cafe Society or MPSIMS-type topic and gotten more negative responses than anything else. It’s infuriating. Even asking people to please please pretty please with a cherry on top not do it doesn’t help. Hell, it seems to attract them. The first few Howard Stern threads I tried to start here crashed and burned because of this. (Now someone will be tempted to say it’s because Howard sucks. You are not clever or original.)
Similarly, whenever Everybody Loves Raymond gets mentioned, people pile on for some reason. I think flock-threadshitting even happened on a ELR thread I started. I love the show, the characters remind me of horribly dysfunctional bizzaro universe versions of people in my family (and I’m sure many Dopers can see where I come from when I say I very much love my family, but that I also love living in a different area code than them).
Not so much an SDMB thing as a message board thing, sure, but when someone starts a topic somewhere (let’s say about firearms), and they somehow manage to adopt a better-than-thou attitude while asking about something that they admittedly have no experience with.
I’m sure this happens in other topics, but since my areas of particular geekdom include firearms, cameras, and food, you can see how this doesn’t catch my eye too often for me outside of the firearms threads (“I have a question for you cooking dopers: Why do you have a jar of Cumin in your pantry when you rarely if ever will actually need to use Cumin? Couldn’t that money have been better spent on shoes for children in Africa or repaying the national debt?” It really doesn’t work in most of my non-firearms discussion topics)
I hear ya. I personally don’t like ELR but would not dream of waltzing into an ELR thread just to say so. I’ve described that before as the online equivalent of walking into a room, ripping a big smelly fart, and then turning around and walking out.
203 posts and nobody has mentioned* the infinisplit quote?
Not exclusive of it or even the sdmb but a true staple of GD. Someone says
and the answer comes:
And then the answer to this comes in the same format and before you know it, every post is 5 pages long and nobody even remembers what the discussion was about as they deconstruct every sentence free of all meaning.
And speaking of quotes, when people quote a page long post for a one line response.
That’s a good one, Sapo. When people get too ponderous and pedantic with their replies, I simply don’t read them. There, effective communication restored.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was referring to in posts 192 et al. When someone can’t dispute your major point they nitpick all your minor points into oblivion. It’s a trick that will make any idiot think they won the argument, and one of the most common styles of argument I see on the sdmb.
FTR, I currently have two jars of cumin in my pantry – I used it up the last time I made chili, so bought more – then remembered that I was out but not that I’d bought some, so I bought a second jar.
And I don’t particularly think of myself as a “cooking doper.”
That’s the one that probably irks me the most. It always seems to be intended in the spirit of “fighting ignorance,” but history and philosophy are perfectly valid academic subjects. If theology is a good enough subject for the great universities, I think it’s good enough for the SDMB.
You know, I don’t think I mind it so much when it is an obvious escape from a thread where you are crashing and burning. What kills me is when it is the standard method of arguing from people who could actually “win the thread” with logic but still fill the need to lay it on real thick.
And I guess I had it coming for starting with the “I can’t believe nobody has mentioned…”.
How 'bout when someone answers for someone else? Man, that boils my blood. No offense to InvisibleWombat - I know s/he was trying to be helpful - but s/he just did it in another thread. I just wish people would let others speak for themselves more often. And this was not an isolated incident by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, now I’m surprised it wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I read this thread. I ask for clarification around here a lot, while a lot of other people seem to just lay their own thoughts/feelings/biases/attitudes on top of the unemotive text that we all post here. The result of this asking, it seems more often than not, is someone else answering for the person I’m asking. HOW IN HELL DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY MEANT?!!
This, like most things in this thread, is by no means exclusive to the SDMB. One of the reasons I might be so sensitive to it is that it happens in classrooms all the time. I’ll ask the professor a question and some student will almost invariably try to answer. The part that’s so maddening is that I may not know the answer, but I almost always know enough to know that the student is wrong. The professor, wanting to get on with the lecture, often doesn’t even comment, because he or she doesn’t want to argue with these loudmouths. I actually had one tell me that when I stayed to get the correct answer after a lecture.
I don’t do that often, because you’re quite right that the “tag team” debates get old fast. In that particular case I was just trying to provide a piece of (hopefully) useful information and I was guessing about whether it’s what the other poster was referring to.
Yeah, it didn’t really bother me so much as it reminded me that in some cases, it bothers me A LOT. Especially in GD, GQ, and the BBQ Pit.
FTR I had seen the picture you were referring to but there were a lot of different pictures and stories about camel spiders going around a few years ago, including stories that they eat camels, or eat people’s faces, etc etc, so I wasn’t sure what the poster meant by “fake”. Fake pictures, fake stories, fake creature altogether, etc.
I realized something I hated, and I only ever see it here. It drives me batshit.
Poster A: Poster B is such a cunt. I hope he dies in a fire, with his family, his pets, and everybody who ever loved his cunt face so that there’s no memory of his worthless existence. FUCK YOU CUNT!
Poster C: Dude, that’s a bit harsh.
Poster D: I’m offended by the word cunt. Several more posts in which nobody agrees with Poster A
Poster A: Dear Poster B, I’m sorry. Though I feel I had a legit grievance against you, I never should have called you a cunt or said you should die in a fire. (Clearly a response to the fact that the pit thread backfired).
Poster C: That’s so classy. What a class guy A dozen or more posts congratulating poster A on being “classy”
Thanks for making the word absolutely meaningless, SDMB! Being a fucking jerk and then apologizing doesn’t make a person classy. Not being a fucking jerk in the first place makes a person classy.
The vast majority of complaints in this thread are just general Internet stuff, and is by no means limited to these boards. But I’ve never seen this Insult-Apology-Lauding for Classiness cycle on any other forum.
I know what you’re saying, pepperlandgirl, but I’m on the fence about that one. On the one hand, you’re totally right; apologizing should be the average thing to do, not the classy thing. On the other hand, no one fucking apologizes anymore even in real life. You can pretty much forget about it online in 99.99% of cases on 99.99% of discussion boards. I hear more and more people these days flat out stating that apologizing is admitting guilt and even if they’re guilty they were raised to never admit guilt. Blame it on idiot parents, I guess. So when you see it, it probably is worth commenting on (although again you’re right that classy probably shouldn’t be the word.)
It is permissible to cut comments from inside QUOTE tags for brevity in order to make a quote germane to your reply. I also cut some of the brackets from inside Dex’s quote so it would format correctly. I believe that is also O.K. However, you may not change any words inside quotes so as to alter the meaning. If someone did that to one of my quotes, I’d be fully justified in reporting that poster.
As I understand it, it is permissible to alter another poster’s words as long as you don’t put them inside QUOTE tags, but that would also irk me if it were done to my words, and I would report it as a violation of the “don’t be a jerk” rule.
It’s annoying, but it’s not the ZOMG TEH HYOOMANITY that it’s made out to be here. People do it on every other board I’ve been to and despite popular opinion here there are other intelligent, civil boards on the internet besides the SDMB. To hear some people around here you’d think every other board is the IMDB forums.
Not at all. I attempt to write in a manner similar to the way I actually talk, for this very reason. A while back, there was a Pit thread about the use of the phrase, “…not so much,” as in, “I like chocolate ice cream; vanilla? Not so much.”
I actually do talk that way.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand why someone from, say, New Jersey, or California, get so riled up over the way someone from, say, Texas or Louisiana talk. They then get their tails in even more of a twist when said southerner interjects “regionalisms” into their post(s) to give them a little flavor.
Fortunately, this is rare; most Dopers are a fairly accepting lot, or just gloss over the whole thing.
But when some jackass get up on a soapbox in the Pit about “fucking hicks” using “y’all” and such in their posts…I want to reach through the monitor and give 'em a swift pop on the snot faucet.
I get irked whenever there is a mention of “The hamsters got hungry” or “The hamsters fell asleep” or “The hamster wheel broke” and all animal variations of that SDMBism. I just always thought it was really lame-a-saurus rex.
It HURTS when things get on your tits.