There is a difference between Great Debates and IMHO, and it seems like we either a) don’t know the difference or 2) just aren’t capable of the type of ignorance fighting that this place is here for.
Today I was reading this thread which started out in the pit but got moved to GD as it was veering more towards an intellectual discussion than a rant.
Folks at this point are pretty much discussing whether or not a child raised by gay adoptive parents is going to be at a disadvantage developmentally as opposed to either not being adopted or being adopted by straight parents.
Not once in the whole thread has anyone come up with any actual information about the topic, just opinions, anecdotes, and conjectures. Come on people! This is Great Debates! Get some guts into your posts. We even have one person saying . . .
. . . and no one called him on it. “I’m in GD, and I’m not going to provide any cites, and you all’ve got to suck it up,” and no one batted an eye. I thought we had set the bar fairly high for facts in GD, but aparently it’s just a place for people to opine and express uninformed opinions about slightly more serious subjects than those in IMHO.
If no one says anything factual, you can’t really have a debate, just people politely or not-so-politely expressing opinion-as-fact and thinking that they’ve added something of value. If this was an opinion-based question that’d be fine, but it’s clearly not. In the question of ‘is it healthy for kids to be raised by gay parents?’ there must be some statistically significant information. It doesn’t really matter if you think it must be unstable, or if you think there’s less likely to be abuse. Is it or isn’t it? Is there or isn’t there?
I have never been able to read GD for extended amounts of time because it really truly makes my head hurt. In all the threads I have read it basically dissolved into a discussion of morality and unsubstaniated views. Sure, opinion is fine, but not when it is a debate. Oh well.
If working in DC and covering the Hill all that time taught me anything it’s that it is possible to find a cite for anything.
Want to find a cite claiming wearing red increases your chances of getting hit by a bus? Betcha some firm released something!
Given the fact that ANY opinion will have the ability to find a cite to back it up then what’s the difference.
I like GD these days when the yahoos keep it to a minimum. But then again I mainly participate in economics, monetary and political threads. That’s kind of my bag.
Yes, the same old topics get hashed over and over. Yes, many of them go nowhere.
But there are some people on this board who actually know their shit, and when they get involved in a GD thread it can really be a decent place. You just gotta wade through a lot of crap…
Fair enough (and a ‘fair enough’ to most of the rest of you too). It just seems that so much of the time folks aren’t interested in debating, just in stating their opinions in no uncertain terms, as if stating what they believe constitutes a debate (You want to debate about whether blue or red is better? Well, I like red. It’s clearly superior, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it cures cancer too).
No, what you have are a small cadre of people who think they know their shit inside and out, and how dare anyone question them? Cite? Fuck them, they don’t need no stinkin’ cite. They don’t gotta prove nothing to nobody.
So basically you have the same topics recycled by the same people holding the same beliefs and opinions, never swaying, never compromising. Whee, what fun.
Hotly contested election year. Polarized electorate. President with a censoredload of scandals coming due. (I didn’t say guilty of.) Random highly dramatic laws. And just to make it all better, a little religious action here and there.
I dunno. There are people who post that way. However, contributions from several posters do fit Metacom’s description better than yours. Just to select a very few (thereby slighting several dozens of others), Tamerlane on history, Darwin’s Finch on evolutionary theory, Dewey Cheatem Undhow on law.
No, I know what you’re talking about. But the contrary position is when someone pulls out a cite and considers that the end of discussion, when cites are really just the beginning (if they’re going to be used). There’s a lot of what I think is garbage in GD, just like the other forums, I guess. I don’t know how people can stand the political threads, myself.
And there’s dispute over the veracity of various cites. I’ve even seen people claim that because something is missing from a source that they consider valid, it must not be true.
