Thread title is not valid, the guy has always been a cunt. The only mystery is why people continue to engage with him.
He is a less reptile-brained than most of the other Republican/conservative members of this board, and thus a greater challenge. It’s no great victory to recognize when HurricaneDitka, Starving Artist, or Fotheringay-Phipps are talking out of their asses (i.e. almost always), so they hardly seem worth the effort.
Occasionally, one can use a conservative poster to help one organize one’s own thoughts in a pleasing manner. I enjoyed arguing abortion with **Omg a Black Conservative **and arguing same-sex marriage with magellan01 not because either of them are intellectual giants, but because they spurred me to articulate my thoughts in a way that I am confident was particularly well-reasoned. I had a similar experience with Bricker during a discussion of no-knock warrants.
Sorry–there wasn’t any message, except to point out the obvious: both acts are technically illegal. That’s it.
The starting point of the thread was entirely beyond that trivial observation, and it was just gratuitous noise to present it as though it were some kind of incisive expose.
Nobody loves Whataboutism more than Bricker. Few are as bad at it as he is. Ignores context, false equivalencies etc. Pretty pathetic. Great at law, and maybe the years of training have him splitting the finest hairs. It does seem he parses everything through lawyer eyes. But it leaves his critical thinking somewhat broken.
He went to a Republican rally, and tried to talk about the Federalist Society to a guy in a MAGA hat. Hasn’t been the same since.
The Republican party left him; left conservatives (financial, moral, small government). He’s lashing out; looking for a thread; anything to ground himself in the current morass that is the small-minded, simplistic, excuse the party has become. He is intelligent, principled, well spoken. The party is dumbed down to slogans. Truth and facts are irrelevant in his new surroundings. The familiar ground of the US Constitution, rule of law, of conservative thought has been perverted to serve a megalomaniac. His new bedfellows are the crude, the racists, the haters. A man adrift.
Yes.
Even a minimal search of Bricker’s posting history over the last 15 years will reveal criticism and abuse identical to what he’s come in for in this thread.
The poster Boyo Jim said this about Bricker back in 2009:
This is why Bricker comes in for the abuse he gets here. He’s a conservative, hella smart, and so effective in debate that it’s difficult bordering on impossible to defeat him. This creates resentment, and that resentment creates the abuse.
I’ve defeated him, I don’t resent him. It mildly amuses me to taunt him on occasion.
What happened to Bricker? Nothing. What happened is that yet another person finally realized who he is.
Everybody gets it sooner or later. Sometimes *much *later, though.
If you want satisfaction from Bricker, you have to avoid his strengths and concentrate on his weaknesses. Bricker has a bit of a gambling problem, and will often make a bet that is less circumspect than he is in his debates. I’ve wagered with him four times, bested him three times, and have $200 to show for it. Much more satisfying than scoring a minor rhetorical point.
Unsurprisingly, you misunderstand what you quoted.
Yes, he’s very smart, and yes, he’s very good at the sort of arguing he does. However, part of the problem is his tendency to move every conversation into a realm he’s comfortable with–the legal–and to disregard or mock any other realm.
There are many discussions to be had about public policy that revolve around what’s wise and what SHOULD be legal. It’s fair to call him out for the behavior of responding as if those realms don’t exist.
SA, that’s true only to the extent that “effective in debate” means he’s simply obstinate, and “it’s difficult bordering on impossible to defeat him” means he can’t admit when he’s lost and that you’re not quite smart enough to recognize it.
I suspect he knew the argument was hopeless from the beginning, but was practicing his very common tactic of introducing an irrelevant comment to divert the thread away from its original purpose.
I’d be far more interested if he faced Trumpism head on.
When there were threads about $cientology, there was one poster who claimed not to be part of the cult, but seemed to have a lot of inside knowledge. Bricker claims to not have voted for Trump, but he seems to be disturbed by attacks on Trump and his loyalists.
And he’s never said anything critical of Trump, either!
The genius at work here is truly a credit to, and emblematic of, the left wing.
I would had won a bet with him about the fate of the ACA, but I thought back then that it was really unseemly to bet for what was in essence a reason for me to stay alive (the ACA was then helping me recover from a nasty encounter with a resistant bacteria infection).
Betting then did feel like when business bet on your life with life settlements, a bit morbid like if I had been put on the SDMB death pool.
Nowadays I get amused at seeing how he even manages to defeat himself:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=21169138&postcount=280
Yeah, that one caught me by surprise, a full-on appeal to popularity. Usually when Bricker sneaks in a logical fallacy, he’s a lot more subtle about it. Tsk. Slipping.
By the way, I also have a standing bet with him (for the princely sum of $2) on a hypothetical SCOTUS ruling on Wisconsin’s pre-abortion mandatory-ultrasound law. Truth be told, I haven’t been following the issue very closely, it might have been mooted or otherwise resolved by now in some way. If not, I’m less confident in prevailing than I was pre-Trump.
And this is exactly what we mean. You just avoided the actual topic of the thread or countering any of the stuff that makes your side look bad, while jumping on one comment and then acting like it said more than it did.
Grasp that straw and wield it as if it was a sword. :rolleyes:
It’s as if you wanted to post as a parody of yourself.
Well there you go. I never said that, did I?
Your strategy, which is the reason for this thread, has become pretty obvious from over use. It is not that much different from Trump’s “why investigate me, investigate Hillary” strategy.
Absent from your posts is that all sins are not morally equivalent. You are the kind of person who, in 1965 Alabama, would be just as concerned about the blocking of the bridge as the reason for the march.
Given your eloquence, might your time be better spent talking about Trump’s attack on the legal system than being concerned about a racist statue being pulled down? Or is your party far more important than your country.