It wasn’t even a Great Debates thread-It was actually posted in General Questions, as if it was a perfectly acceptable and neutral term to use in that forum.
Search using Google – site:boards.straightdope.com “gun nut”
I fear such a search might damage the internet.
Not really.
“Gun nut”-6,050
“Gun-grabber”-1,420
At first glance this shows you to be correct by a large margin, but keep in mind that “gun nut” has been around a much longer time than “gun grabber” so somebody needs to nail down the first time the latter phrase was used to get a proper comparison.
Let say the question is which end of a hard boiled egg to open.
Swiftly, the debate descends to partisan bickering. One side offers the reasonable and sensible position that a boiled egg is naturally shaped to be opened at the larger end. Deranged and unnatural persons who cannot see the blazingly obvious object, and refer to partisans of common sense as “fat enders”. Now, these are people blessed with the common sense that God gave a goose, but provoked beyond decorum, they begin to refer to their opposite numb-nuts as “pointys”.
This being a board devoted to reason and intelligence, one expects that “fat enders” outnumber “pointys” by at least ten to one. This is, after all, the Board for the smartest and hippest people on the planet, so that naturally follows.
Wouldn’t one then expect that if the courtesy and decorum of both groups are about roughly the same, the term “pointy” would appear more often than “fat enders”, as the numbers of their relative partisans are so widely at variance? So, of course! “pointy” would appear more often as there are more people inclined to say it!
Très duh!
That is why I made a reference to Schrodinger in that thread, the argument made there by **Bricker **was an appeal to uncertainty, better than an appeal to ignorance but still looks like a bad argument, and it is clear now that the reference I made became a whoosh to Bricker.
It rarely is but when it is, this board tends to ignore anything short of airtight proof that the conservative position is correct.
Well desire connotes intent. Intent is harder to prove than a callous indifference to the devastating effects the budget would have on the poor.
No, that just means he’s an asshole.
Creating suffering for the poor is a feature not a flaw. It incentivizes them to stop being poor. Also, does it include a tax cut for job creators because some people would consider that a benefit.
Its a pretty dark shade of grey.
We all make judgments about people’s morality based on their actions and values.
I think the result has been that the average quality of the conservative posters on this board is vastly superior to the average quality of the liberal poster on this board. Too many liberal posters on this board skate by on the “white privilege” of being in the majority.
Gun nut isn’t always a perjorative term. Even among gun owners, we call ourselves and each other gun nut. But maybe its one of those perjorative terms like nigger and redneck that have been adopted by their victims to defuse their impact.
Or just change the subject, start with the “cite that water is wet”, or just say “Bush lied about Iraq”.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks!
Can you expand on what you precisely mean here, and particularly how it applies to the SDMB?
That’s why the minority works so hard to become the majority. Or, failing that, lie down in the path and start tearing their hair and screaming “NO! NO! NO!”.
The basic question in the OP implies that boards that favor Conservatives/Republicans treat Liberals/Democrats with a respect that the former are not receiving here. Is this true?
No… nobody’s arguing here that it would hurt the poor, but rather whether or not Paul Ryan was wherever he was twirling his phantom mustache cackling about intentionally hurting the poor, or whether the injury to the poor was seen as either an incentive of sorts or an unfortunate consequence of something larger and longer term.
Don’t get me wrong- I never liked Ryan’s plan either, but I’ve never seen it as a deliberately malicious plan to screw the poor; at its very worst, it’s a naked plan to enrich the wealthy more, with screwing the poor as a side-effect.
But that’s a whole lot different than saying that Paul Ryan has a desire to hurt the poor, and that’s the crux of the matter here- it’s that kind of hyperbolic statement that Republican/conservative posters have to defend against that makes the playing field uneven and frankly, drives many good posters away from those threads, or from the board entirely.
No, it doesn’t. It makes no mention of right-leaning boards at all, and how this board treats conservatives doesn’t affect other boards in the slightest.
Regards,
Shodan
Um…where does it imply that? I’d say, in my own experience it’s definitely not true that other boards that are balanced differently treat Liberals/Democrats with more respect. Regardless, the actual question in the OP was simply why there are so many ‘Democrats’ here, by which I think the OP means left leaning folks. It has nothing to do with how Republicans or right leaning folks are treated here…that’s been sort of the side discussion.
[QUOTE=OP]
Why does this board lean Democrat?
According to this 4-year-old poll (maybe it’s time for a new one), the left outnumber the right about 1.6-to-1 (assuming we count libertarians as right-leaning, and split the independents and “other” down the middle). What is it about the SDMB that attracts the left? Is it its affiliation with the Chicago Reader (seems unlikely)? We’re not really a special interest board, the only thing we really have in common (re General Questions and The Straight Dope column itself) is a pursuit of the truth, which would not appear to appeal to one side over the other.
[/QUOTE]
ETA: Or what Shodan said.
Bull. This whole “Conservatives are going elsewhere because they aren’t being treated fairly here” thing going on certainly implies that they are going somewhere more “fair”. Asking what they would consider to be fair on a board more to they liking is certainly within reason. Are they leaving to go to a liberal board that treats them better, a neutral board that treats everyone the same, or a conservative board where they get to be top dog? Where they go from here tells us what they would want to go on here if they were to stay, wouldn’t you say?
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Just one follow up: where was the money to enrich the wealthy supposed to come from?
It was not a side-effect; it was a mechanism.
BINGO! Reverse the people involved. “Obama wants to just tax the middle class to create his socialist state!” “Obama wants to take all of our guns away!” “Obama supports the Muslim states because he hates Israel!” Pretty pathetic, right? If anyone said something like this they’d be shouted down as some redneck derp Tea-Partier.
You can’t read his mind any more than you can read Ryan’s (or can you?) and to give some half-assed ulterior motive to these politicians based on their policy decisions is ridiculous. Rephrasing as, “Obama’s tax policies appear to be negatively hurting the middle class to benefit Federal programs,” or “Obama’s proposed gun laws look like they will make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to purchase guns and may wind up restricting the models that they can get or even keep,” or “Obabma’s support for the many Middle East states that have been antagonistic to Israel can be detrimental to the safety and security of America’s long time ally.”
It’s not a zero sum game, Hentor…and, frankly, the poor don’t have enough wealth to make it worth while to try and steal it from them. Paul isn’t trying to steal the wealth from the poor to give it to the rich in some reverse Robin Hood scam, he wants to let the rich keep more of their wealth for themselves instead of having to give it to the poor. Now, whether that’s a good thing or a bad one is going to depend on ones perspective, but in Paul’s case he THINKS it would help both the rich and the poor. He could be wrong, but ascribing hateful motives is basically just partisan hackery.
Why would that matter?
I think you know very well that the case is true across the board with all such ‘searches’. The fact that the progressive folks on here get a pass at a much greater rate than the conservatives is rather well known, to all of us.
The wealth wasn’t generated by taximg the poor, since as you note they don’t have wealth to begin with. It was to be generated by slashing government expenditures that serve to reduce the hardships on the poor.
Didn’t you understand that?