Relevant discussion here beginning at post 51, and getting juicy at post 61
Emacknight, your argument style is too confrontational and unproductive. In fact, during every one of your posts in that thread it’s impossible to tell the sarcasm from the argument, because you never state an honest position. You ridicule other positions as a way to deflect the responsibility of defending your own, and it’s a trend consistent with most of your GD posts. You are a dishonest debater, and you have proven that you do not argue in good faith. I suspect you don’t even honestly hold the opinions you defend (when you bother to articulate an opinion at all) most of the time.
I am sympathetic to emacknight. The state of understanding of the forces of economics on many of the posters in that thread and on this board is abyssmal. Frustration is inevitable. I choose not to participate, which would perhaps be a wise choice in his case, but I am sure if I did participate I would devolve to the same level of sarcasm.
That’s great, but he doesn’t have any better understanding of it than the rest of us, he just acts like he does.
His method seems to be to try to make the people he’s arguing against look foolish, rather than attack the actual argument, hence the heavy sarcasm and “devil’s advocacy” he likes to employ. Because of that, he leans hard toward strawmen, a word I’ve used more than once to describe his arguments because it never fucking fails to apply, and a generally dismissive tone.
All of that does a fine job of expressing the attitude of “I know so much more about economics than you idiots and I’m merely deigning to waste my time with you,” but when you actually get at the meat of his posts his arguments are just as facile as those he looks down on, sometimes more so.
Be that as it may (and to a real extent I agree), that does not on my view excuse outright hostility. I’ll reserve judgment about my level of sympathy for his frustration when I figure out whether his bafflingly silly, but confusingly deadpan, first post was sincere.
Whether we like it or not, this is true - it’s the essence of an asset bubble. As has been noted by many people, most acessibly by Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short,” the few people who were willing to say things were going to fall about were saying that the subprime market would fail even if house prices just rose slowly. They didn’t have to fall. They just had to go back to growing at a historically normal level.
If you buy a house with the expectation that the house’s value is going to skyrocket indefinitely and that that will save your financial ass, you’re ignorant. I don’t know how else to put it; it’s just flat out crazy. I knew otherwise smart people who really believed this would happen and there was no talking them out of it so maybe it was some kind of mass hysteria.
I’m not say emacknight couldn’t be a little less snarky and a little more constructive, but he isn’t adding any ignorance to that thread.
Had the same experience with housing prices and other people’s odd ideas about them. But then, had the same experience with stock prices during the tech bubble too. Just couldn’t explain to some people that startups with bad business models that were burning through cash like they were heating their buildings with it were a bad investment and would soon be going belly up.
Humans have an incredible gift when it comes to self-delusion, and for some reason, when an upward trend begins we seem to think it will last forever.
No plain not followed by a slope
No going not followed by a return
He who remains persevering in danger
Is without blame.
Do not complain about this truth
Enjoy the good fortune you still possess.
I find emacknight to be one of the most annoying posters on these boards. Many of his posts sound like a right-wing moron trying to parody the writings of a left-wing imbecile. Other posts sound like a left-wing moron trying to parody the writings of a right-wing imbecile. One can’t be sure which, if either, posture is sincere.
I doubt if emacknight is actually a moron, clinically, but that just takes away a possible excuse, and makes his attempts at ideation all the more contemptible.
With many examples to choose one, I’ll just mention one that left several of us flabbergasted. First I need to discuss traffic conditions in less-developed countries, e.g. India.
According to Wikipedia, India had 15 vehicles per capita in 2006 compared with 828 in the U.S. in 2009. India had 16.8 traffic-related deaths per 100,000 persons versus 12.3 for U.S.
again according to Wikipedia. Using these numbers, we see that traffic fatalities per vehicle in India are 75 times greater than in the U.S.
(Now I am aware that this calculation is questionable for a variety of reasons. For starters, I didn’t even use the same year for “vehicles for capita.” Better Googlers are free to improve the numbers, but I made an honest effort with my own searching skills.)
Wikipedia does summarize with “90% (of the world’s road traffic deaths) occurred in low and middle income countries, with South-East Asia and Africa having the highest rates.” One thing seems clear to me: Developed countries have more developed traffic law enforcement, and fewer accidents.
Despite that SDMB right-wingers may have developed a left-wing caricature of myself, I’m actually relatively libertarian, and find some traffic laws annoying and stifling. But I’ve also driven several 100,000 miles in a country where traffic rules are ignored and, while it may seem “romantic and adventurous” to wonder if you’re coming back alive from a dangerous mountain road, I would prefer the security of driving with “stifling” U.S.-style traffic regulations. When asked to compare Thailand and the U.S.A., one of the first differences that comes to mind is the annoyance and danger I feel when driving on the roads here.
Now … what does this have to do with emacknight? Consider this quote:
“Oddly enough it works”?? :smack: The country with 75 times as many fatalities per vehicle is the Libertarian traffic-law utopia that U.S. needs to emulate? In the thread, someone mentioned India’s higher fatalities; emacknight pretended that he already knew that, and posted a misleading statistic (deaths per capita in a country where most don’t own a car or commute :smack: ).
AFAICT, the memes that every government regulation is evil and that every government employee is incompetent are so ingrained with emacknight, that the idea that government-enforced traffic laws could be good just never occurred to him.
I suppose in his Utopia, where streets are privately owned, each street owner would choose from amongst private traffic-light purveyors, trading off cost versus injuries according to a market-driven model.
My post in 51 wasn’t any dumber than the shit that proceeded it, yet still only slightly smarter than blaming witches. Even after that post, we still get our resident economics professor emeritus bitching about a house that sold for $325k a few years ago that now has no equity.
That whole thread is a parody of modern politics. What a surprise that a bunch of liberals rationalized a way to blame Reagan and bankers.
Hell, we could replace [financial meltdown] with any number of different topics and get exactly the same thread.
The fucking melt down was 3 years ago, how many threads have there been on exactly that same topic, with exactly the same people, and exactly the same arguments?
The best part is that when we get another crash in a couple of years we’ll still be arguing about this one. How is that going to work?
“His method seems to be to try to make the people he’s arguing against look foolish,”
They are foolish, but worse they are both repetitive and popular. You can’t use reason to persuade a person away from a position they didn’t use reason to arrive at. So if slowly and calmly trying to educate a person about the events leading up to the crisis hasn’t worked for the past 3 years, what’s left? Eventually the most foolish get banned and the board moves back towards sanity.
"I, for one, have a hell of a hard time ever working out what that guy is actually for. "
It’s right there in the banner at the top of the page. The point here isn’t to pick a side and then defend that side ad nauseum. Which results in hilarity like discussions about US health care, if I correct a lying conservative I’m labeled a liberal, if I correct a lying liberal I’m labeled a conservative.
This was the best exchange:
I’m a Canadian, living in the US, that prefers the Canadian health care system. Yet I’m also a believer in the for profit system and parroting rightwing mantra? hmmmmm
This message board is a fascinating case study in how people rationalize a decision they’ve already made. There was a thread recently where someone kept rationalizing stupid things poor people do: Drink? It helps numb the pain. Eat shitty food? They’re tired and it’s easy. Gamble? They can’t afford a 401(k).
Damn, my first pitting, so much less than I had hoped for. At least septimus showed up to bitch about libertarianism, although that’s really all he/she/it does so it might have been in the wrong thread.
But before I go, here’s a link to an article I haven’t read that is in no way related to the discussion
The one central sincere idea behind emac’s position, as near as I can determine it, is that if regulations aren’t 100% perfect, we shouldn’t have them at all. Deaths still happen despite the existence of traffic laws? Then we might as well not have traffic laws at all.
Yeah, especially when you’re wrong, insulting, rude and really, really stupid. Like you.
As for the subject of this Pitting, I stopped reading his posts a long time ago when I couldn’t make heads nor tails of what he was saying. Too much passion and not enough coherence.
The country with 75 times as many fatalities per vehicle is the Libertarian traffic-law utopia that U.S. needs to emulate? 
In the thread, someone mentioned India’s higher fatalities; emacknight pretended that he already knew that, and posted a misleading statistic (deaths per capita in a country where most don’t own a car or commute :smack: ).