So does the board skew left?

The BBQ Pit
241

Okay, how about this one?

Or this one?

Oh, here’s another:

And here’s Brutus, back when he was using “Ottto” as his handle:

As far as I can tell, there isn’t any drive-by-night trolls in those examples – a lot of them are still active members of the SDMB.

I’m disappointed in the SDMB search feature – it seems to stop around early 2000. Might have been the time the board went down for a few weeks and switched to new software or something.

Is this anything like the “One true Scotsman” fallacy? “Well, he’s not a real ‘resident conservative,’ so that doesn’t count.”

In any event, while I’d rather give this matter a rest (since, as I said before, I don’t usually give posts in the Pit more attention than I’d give a brief chat at the water cooler[sup][/sup], I’ll just throw out a few more wildly outrageous accusations from the SDMB Resident Conservatives:
[sup][/sup]Admittedly, a water cooler with small arms fire nearby… :wink:

And finally, the obligatory “you evil liburils love terrorists” dig:

As I said before, I don’t have a problem with folks venting their spleen – that’s the whole point of the Pit. Just don’t be surprised when others vent back…

242

WTF? You didn’t quote me above and then go on to compare me to a child with crumbs on his face? You stupid fuck, if you are complaining that I can’t provide evidence that conservatives here have been known to make outrageous statements that essentially equate Muslims with terrorists because it was rjung’s claim, then it seems you are just bitching because I’m interrupting some kind of pile on.

Well, pile on you dumb fuck. I don’t give two shits if you hate Bush or fantasize about taking a load in the face from him. Just don’t support Bush with some kind of deception or lie, and I won’t give a fuck.

243

Hey, I agreed from the moment you said it - there’s virulently anti-Muslim sentiment here, and I find it disgusting. I’m glad Brutus has taken his portion with him, but of course we still have Starving Artist to pick up the slack.

You’re saying it’s irrelevant to consider what longtime members do and say in determining board sentiment? Like I’ve said a couple times, people have said all sorts of insane shit here on the the SDMB, whether it’s racist propaganda or trying to convince us that screwing children is okay. Taggert was banned after a month, he posted 200 times, he was a troll who was chased out. That’s not the same as the folks who have sat around and pushed their positions for years.

I’m realizing as the thread goes that I was seriously mistaken in ranking you among the worst of the set of folks that I’m upset with, rjung. I still think you post way, way too many hijacks, but you’re not the screaming ninny that a lot of these folks are, either. I’m sorry for implying that you were - you’ve certainly not shown yourself to be one of the obnoxious, stupid reactionaries that I was upset yourself. My sincere apologies.

Are you still here?

Look, obviously we’ll have to agree to disagree. I wish Bush would contract horrifying, permanent skin diseases that leave him in agony until the end of his worthless days on earth (and when have I ever, ever not made that clear?) I just don’t think it should be the subject of every damn thread here. You consider that tantamount to wanting to have sex with me. Based on this, I think I can say without reservations that you’re a moronic absolutist; you are too stupid to contribute anything to our discussions here on the SDMB or to the world at large with your existence. You should feel guilt-ridden until the end of your days that you are using oxygen that could be put to some more useful purpose, like supporting colonies of termites. Have a pleasant evening. :slight_smile:

244

Damn! I’m just I’m starting to like you and then you go and post shit like this. I’m sorry to apparently be the sorce of your tender-hearted disgust, but I’d like to know just what it is in my post quoted above that shows me to be “virulently” anti-Muslim…or anti-Muslim at all, virulent or not. I’ve known many Mulim people in my life and without a single exception I’ve liked them very, very much. I have on occasion, gone to lengths they regarded as quite extraordinary to help them if they needed it. I have never written a blanket condemnation of Islam, nor of Muslims themselves.

At the time I wrote the comments quoted above, I believe I was pretty clearly making an exaggeration to prove a point. I never expected to have to prove that 99.99999% of terrorists are Muslim…however, since it seems that you find this comment so disgusting, I would like to address it a little further. First, to my mind, the information on the site that Red Fury provided does little in my mind to prove my comment was indeed wrong. My comment may have been, but the website he referenced doesn’t prove it so. There are two problems with the information to be found there: First, my comment references the total number of terrorists in the world who are members of terrorist groups and/or who engage in or plan to engage in terrorist activity. It does not reference the number of attacks by this or that group. Clearly, if a terrorist group with a thousand members commits twenty terrorist acts, and another group of 250 terrorists commits twenty terrorist acts, it would not be in error to state that the group of a thousand members constitutes the larger percentage of terrorists. Secondly, there is an oddly disproportionate number of so-called terrorist attacks that can’t be ascribed to any particular group. To me, this seems strange given that the very reason terrorist attacks occur is to attempt to influence subsequent events in favor of whatever cause the terrorists support. This causes me to question both the validity of the research presented on that site and the conclusions that can be drawn from it.

I made the simple observation – an observation that is perfectly obvious to anyone who isn’t contorting their view to such an extent that would make a circus contortionist proud – that Muslim terrorist organizations and Muslim terrorists far outnumber those of any other group, and that they are pervasive in regions throughout the world. I know of no other terrorist group that comes close to matching them in either size, number or global infiltration. (If you know of one I’d be most happy to hear about it.) Then, following that observation I posed my rumination as to why that was the case.

Now you can claim to be incensed, disgusted, horrified, or any other type of revulsion that may have gripped you, but you look pretty silly doing it and you give me no pause whatsoever.

245

There, I’ve said it.

Purely anecdotal, but the majority of people I come into contact with who are what I would consider to be “people of substance,” people who are critical thinkers, who make an effort to read beyond the headlines, people who have a shred of empathy, and who think before they talk, more often than not have what you would call “liberal” leanings (of course, I’m posting from Boston). Conversely, those who know nothing of an issue other than the latest telegenic pre-digested buzzwords, who cannot articulate or defend their words, and exhibit a “me first” attitude tend to be of a more “conservative” bent.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions; I have met and respect a number of people who cleave to the Republican party for very reasoned, principled arguments. I have also met many leftist loons. Well when I was in college anyway.

So much for anecdotes. A more quantitative example is the PIPA report (warning: PDF) which has been hashed and re-hashed shortly after its release.

So there you have it. Republican’s aren’t necessarily stupid, but a lot of stupid people gravitate to the Republican/Conservative fold. You’ll find them on lots of other boards, but not one where they’ll be expected to stand and deliver, like here. Those who can and do (nods to Sam Stone and the under-appreciated Mr. Moto) do this board a great service by preventing it from becoming a boring circle-jerk.

The “intolerance” that some conservatives feel is fueled, in part, by this. I see someone rising to the defense of the administration, and instantly envision some mouth-breathing, shack-dwelling rube who couldn’t find America on a map of…well, America. Then I read the rest of their post and more often than not have to change tack, stat. Unless, of course, it’s from Brutus.

So, to the OP, If you’d feel more comfortable with kindred spirits, I recommend a stint on the Yahoo message boards, where you can join such luminaries as “libs-r-pathetic,” “liberal_ignoramus,” or (I swear, I am not making this up) “selfish_liberal_filth.”

246

Not quite kosher, Starv, that pig won’t fly.

You claim to be merely stating the obvious, something flatly apparent. “The vast majority of breast cancer victims are women”. You are, as you well know, in the company of persons inclined to argument, people who tend to think that a statement of fact is generally offered in support of a position. When the position is unstated they are likely to leap to the most obvious conclusion. You are as responsible for your implications as you are for your statements. If you wanted to restrain that implication, a very few words would have sufficed. You can claim innocence only if you can claim an utter ignorance of rhetorical skills. Don’t even think about it.

247

In the interest of fostering tolerance, may I suggest that you are a biased source? As am I, by the way. Of course we want to believe that people who don’t think the way we do are the dumb ones. So when we run into one, boy do we remember it. I can’t count the number of ‘stupid liberals’ I’ve run into. You know why? Because the vast majority of people are not political junkies like us. But when you meet an ignorant fellow traveler, you don’t engage them in debate and discover the shallowness of their position. If they say something supportive of your position but founded in ignorance, you probably don’t even notice, or you just enjoy the shared perspective.

And you can always find large groups of people on the ‘other side’ who are laughably stupid, and you can use this to smear the entire opposition. For example, I happen to know a whole bunch of extremely wacky new-age crystal-rubbing idiots who play with their tarot cards and talk about which stones they carry on a given day to help with their particular malady. Every single one that I know is also a die-hard liberal. So that mean liberals are stupid? No, it means this particular human foible happens to dovetail with the Liberal position. So it is with some definable groups on the ‘other side’.

You might be interested in discovering that wide swaths of conservatives on the internet think exactly the same of your side. Go read some conservative message boards, and you’ll hear all kinds of comments about how the conservatives have all the ideas, they’re the ones that understand economics, they’re the rational ones. They think Liberals are touchy-feely idiots ruled by their emotions and a denial of reality. They laugh uproariously at those Liberals who declare themselves part of the ‘reality-based community’. When they debate liberals, they throw Hayek, Friedman, and Von Mises in their face and watch them sputter, then pat themselves on the back for being far more educated and intelligent than those greasy hippies who studied painting in college and don’t have a clue.

So both sides can play that game. Myself, I try to avoid it and deal with people as individuals. My thinking is this: There are people smarter than me on BOTH sides of the political aisle, so perhaps there’s more to this whole ideology thing than beign able to discover an ‘obvious’ truth that will prove one side smarter or better than the other.

248

I contend that the “obvious” conclusion varies from reader to reader, and in the case of certain posters to this thread the conclusion depends upon their perception of me as a liberal or conservative and what their own prejudices lead them to think I believe.

I disagree. It’s been my observation in life that people often fail to take what you say the way you mean it. Instead, their interpretation of your words depends upon their pre-existing views, beliefs, experiences and prejudices. I don’t believe it’s possible to state a POV in such a way that every reader will interpret what you’re saying in the same way.

:: bows humbly ::

Why, thank you, my friend.

:wink:

249

No worries. Everybody has “off” times, even me; I’m just sufficiently annoying to not give a toot about being annoying. :slight_smile:

“I write because I am personally amused by what I do, and if other people are amused by it, then it’s fine. If they’re not, then that’s also fine.”
–Frank Zappa

250

From that I infer that you believe in Feng Shue.

251

Leaving aside the fact that I normally think that rjung is batshit crazy, I have to say this…
Best. Zappa. Quote. Ever.

252

Well said, Sam ( I can can you Sam, right?). I am biased, and there’s plenty of ignorant idiots on both sides of the spectrum. I guess what I was trying to say in my ham-fisted way, was that this board is different in that you really had better know the facts behind the issues before opening your trap, lest one have a new orifice ripped into one. The PIPA report makes it clear that a hefty percentage of self-identified Bush voters (who can safely be described as Republicans/Conservatives), don’t appear to be, uh, deep thinkers, and probably would be more comfortable on other sites.

253

The PIPA report, in my opinion, is just another example of bias. I could produce one just like it that shows how wrong and stupid and uneducated Democrats are, just by picking a different set of questions.

254

Fair enough, Sam.

Please do so.

255

I don’t think that the PIPA report shows that one party’s followers are dumber than the others, but rather that people tend to hear and believe those things that support their position. The PIPA report dealt mostly with the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues that were driven by GW Bush. Since the war in Irag was based on the claim of WMDs it would be natural for those who supported the war in the beginning (mostly Republicans) would be the last to acknowledge that the claim has been proven to be false. At the same time it would be expected to see that those who opposed the war from the beginning to be the first to be convinced that there were no WMDs.

To that extent I think that Sam is right at least to the degree that if the questions had to do with some of the errors in Bill Clinton’s administration, you would see Democrats clinging to errors of facts long after Republicans had acknowledged them to be false.

None of this has anything to do with Republicans, Democats, conservatives or liberals, but with human nature.

256

To clear up the matter of whether or not this board skews to the left: yes, I have created something that some might describe as Britney Spear porn, though any resemblance to my image and that of Britney Spears is strictly concidental.

Here’s a two-step link since the image is, while not pornographic, not work safe either.

To clear up what Binary was droning on and on about, I started a thread asking about when an image based on a photo becomes sufficiently altered to be considered an independent artwork, and offered up the “Britney Spears porn” as an example. Inevitably, there were link requests. I complied, and the discussion devolved into whether or not the artwork was worth looking at, copyright infringement or othewise. :stuck_out_tongue:

Still, I thought the initial comment was an interesting example of the way people try to devalue political or intellectual interests by establishing that people have sexual interests. In point of fact, my “Britney Spears porn” is totally irrelevant to whatever skill or knowledge I might have wrt economics. I really doubt that I am the most informed liberal on this board in the area of economics, or even close to it. I argue about free market economics because I feel that the notion that free market capitalism is the best system is used by conservative economists as a stalking horse to advance a system that inevatibly works to reward the wealthy and beggar the poor, unless carefully regulated to avoid such a result. I have yet to read anything from a free market advocate that even vaguely resembles a refutation of that position. So of course I argue about it.

I’ve been thinking about doing a thread about the way some people see sexual interests as somehow rendering people unfit for political or even rational discussion. Thanks for the f’rinstance. In point of fact, I think if all economists were required to spend at least some of their time creating Britney Spears porn, or its equivalent, the world would be a better place.

257

I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

258

Bugger his newsletter, I want to see this Brittany Spears porn.

259

This is good stuff. 250+ posts to affirm what we already know. In other news, bears are Catholic, and Ratzi shits in the woods. Stop the presses already. :rolleyes:

260

Why thank you, but I do not have one. I do have a website, but it’s a free admission kinda thing, I not being a rational actor and all. There is precious little to do with economics on it, but I do think you might like this one.