Again, exactly this sort of catastrophizing pearl-clutching was leveraged by the right against, e.g., the “Rodney King riots” nearly thirty years ago.
The vast majority of liberals are against violence and lawlessness and the vast majority of liberal protestors never commit any. But whenever there’s a rare outbreak of violence and lawlessness with injustice-related political motivations, conservatives are always trying to use it as a boogeyman to scare people about liberals in general.
And again, in order to keep scaring their audience with the prospect of rampaging liberals being imminently about to destroy society with their lawless violence, conservatives have to keep ignoring all the previous times they scared their audiences with exactly the same exaggerated insinuations about exactly the same sort of temporary social unrest.
I wouldn’t argue that every person who opposes abortion does so out of misogyny but I believe the pro-birth movement as a whole reflects an appalling lack of empathy for women. And I would not be surprised if 30% of Democrats are misogynist, it’s not like Republicans corner the market on misogyny. I see it spread pretty equally across the political spectrum.
Though it may be drifting a bit far afield for this thread, I find all the nuance to this issue (to be a wee bit lacking in Sam’s comment, and) pretty fascinating:
No, because those are terms with actual objective criteria, not mere insults. There is, of course, some subjectivity in the middle, near the line. But I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen those words used when it wasn’t very clearly over that line.
Having different political opinions is, of course, not inherently bigotry. But when those opinions are inconsistent with themselves, but are consistent with bigotry, that’s a pretty good sign the bigotry is in the driver’s seat. And when the poster has also let slip various bigoted things, that makes it rather certain.
I propose that you are biased in your analysis of octopus’s posts. He’s a poster who, out of one side of his mouth, complains that the Pit is too mean, and on the other side is actively mean within the Pit. He talks about supporting freedom of expression—but then we have threads like this where he’s against it. And, while there are definitely posters who will say mean things about Republican sometimes, I don’t know a single poster for whom that is the bulk of their contributions. I cannot say the same for octopus and liberals/Democrats.
I do not have every conservative poster here on ignore. But I do have octopus on ignore because he is so clearly disingenuous. And while I’ll admit I’ve not yet put anyone on the US left on permanent ignore yet, I have definitely considered it. In fact, one such incident happened in this very thread.
As you may suspect, you are also not on my ignore list. I do not think you are inherently disingenuous. Though I will admit that arguing that a poster who is being inflammatory is not a troll because they come back and defend their positions is such a dubious argument that I wondered for a bit.
I can’t think of a successful troll who didn’t do that. To argue he’s not a troll, you have to argue that he’s not being disingenuous, or enjoying trying to piss people off.
I’ve always been against extrajudicial violence. That includes police brutality. When folks here joke about prison rape and other brutalities in prison I’m pretty sure I’m one of the few who pushed back on that.
Since, I’ve been on this board I have consistently stated all people should be treated as individuals and not penalized or rewarded based upon immutable characteristics. What I won’t do is undermine support for individual liberty and rights based upon Age of Enlightenment ideals because people get their feelings hurt or a desired political outcome is not achieved.
I even support left leaning ideas when they make sense. I consistently voice support for universal basic income. Although as part of a set of economic reforms. My point of view has shifted on issues such as the death penalty and gay marriage in large part due to interactions on this board. I even have stopped poking fun at certain majors, for the most part, due to conversations with you in particular.
I have to tread much more lightly then the average poster here because my posts are more likely to get reported and folks are more likely to pit and gossip about me because I’m an outlier and the mods do have their biases. So, be exasperated if you wish, but your ideological side is far more repellant on this board than what I post.
What you folks don’t like is when people fight back and don’t capitulate to social pressure. Hell, folks even use social pressure and social manipulations to play the mods. It’s not right. It shouldn’t be about who has the most friends on and off a message board. It should be about presenting an argument in a civil way as stated on the main web page by the creator of the site.
But everyone who has said the election was rigged has been a lying sack of shit or a deranged useful fool. I mean everyone. They are ‘solving’ a problem that does not exist and hurting older and poorer voters in the process. Not that you care about that.
I proudly wear the multiple bans for fact-based discussion from more than a couple conservative subreddits on my chest. That your trolling is permitted here should not be taken as an indicator that snowflakes don’t throw hammers at people that disagree with them elsewhere.
Of course I advocate for my point of view. I can’t nor do I care to force others to agree. If something is factual and I’m incorrect I’ll concede the point. If it’s an opinion the best one can do is use some form of reason from a set of axioms to deduce a conclusion. Even in the best case scenario different people will have different axioms that their ideological foundations rests upon. Even in the best case where reason is perfectly applied different rational conclusions will be reached. It’s inevitable when different people have differing postulates and/or weigh those postulates differently.
Posting on the SDMB is far from best case. Far too many folks here debate in bad faith and with poor reasoning. That’s regrettable because many of the people here are very educated and are capable of honest debate but due to ideology or desire to fit in socially choose not to.
We got fools in this very thread who don’t even understand what arguing from a principle of individual liberty means. It’s hard to deal with that nonsense and when the vast majority of active posters in political threads are basically identical it’s not called out.
This is the Pit. So civil isn’t a necessity. Outside of the Pit check out the unremarked upon and constant hyperbolic broad brush characterizations of those right of Stalin in any of several thousand political, debate, etc. threads.
It’s not thick skin that brings Octopus and Sam back here. It’s the heroism cosplay they can engage in.
Some people like to pretend to be an orc warrior and go kill skeletons in World of Warcraft. They adopt a persona and go fight fantasy enemies and feel tough and like they accomplished something. Sure, they know that those “skeletons” aren’t really skeletons, and they know they’re not an orc warrior. Sure, in real life they couldn’t swing a sword any more than they could cast a fireball. But they’re able to suspend disbelief long enough to gain the pleasure of combat.
So it is with Sam and octopus. They pretend to be keenly intelligent philosophers who come defeat the liberal mob on the Straight Dope. They adopt the fantasy persona and come over here and “debate”–that is, pretend to debate. Maybe they know we’re not really a “liberal hive mind” or a “mob” or whatever fantasy they’ve placed on us, I’m not really sure how much they’ve bought into their fantasy. Maybe they know they’re shitty debaters; again, I’m not sure how much they believe their cosplay is real.
But their ridiculous demonization of liberal/progressive/leftist positions is a central part of their cosplay. Their coming to a place where they’ll encounter disagreement, and stoking hostility, is how they grab aggro. The fact that people attack them for these practices, justifies their heroism. Their sanctimonious comments about how thick their skin has to be, about how meeeean everyone is to conservatives, about how consistent and principled they are? This is fantasy virtue signaling, the equivalent of dressing your paladin in spiffy looking new armor.
It doesn’t take thick skin for them to be here. Pretending to be maverick independent thinkers vanquishing the liberal horde is their MMORPG of choice.
For what it’s worth, I spend a lot of time on www.OANN.com, where you can’t even find a liberal poster who isn’t called just about everything in the book for merely suggesting that Trump is less than a god.
I don’t know that that’s really it. It’s victim cosplay that they engage in more than anything else.
A victim of oppression has more “moral latitude” to engage. In an extreme example, if the slaves of a plantation rose up and killed the owners of that plantation, I would not think that they were immoral in that act.
By playing the oppressed victim here, it justifies any behavior that they feel is necessary to strike back at their oppressors. They are coming from a position of righteousness, and can do no wrong.
Their media options of choice, which are of course, unbiased, have told them repeatedly that Democrats are all baby killing demons who want undocumented immigrants to pour over the border, take our jobs and ruin the country. They know this to be true, so why should they make an argument for it?
And then when many people call them fools and idiots and tell them they have no valid argument, this just further cements them in their certainty.
Also, the MMORPG and victim complex as stated above certainly play a large role.
You do realize that most of the time you knuckleheads start the pitting and then cry when it doesn’t go the way you wished. That’s the hypocrisy.
Now LHoD’s rambling completely misses the point that the vast majority of the board that is politically engaged behaves far worse with their obsessive rants about the right. Which they are free to interject into practically any thread outside of GQ.
IRL, I knew a guy that was pretty sure that everyone around him was a fool. He knew better, and knew it all. He’d moved from career to career, and everywhere he worked, he was surrounded by fools. Every single time. It was amazing how much he knew and how little they did. And he was pleased to tell them about all the stuff they didn’t know.
He also used the term “hive mind” to describe all these idiots who just refused to see things the way he did. Everyone where he (used to) work was “piling on” when he was always right.