Takes me awhile to get back to this as I’m trying to relandscape the backyard as well as rip out the bathroom and rebuid it…
I agree with what you said. I apologize if what I was doing was threadshitting but it really wasn’t my intention. Again, those four threads could have been posted as one. What he HAS started as four threads so far are indistinguishable from a blog.
Rather than re-type it, just re-read the title of this thread.
on edit…HAH! New page!
Xploder
We actually have something in common. My wife and I are re-landscaping, too. But it’s the front and back yards. Fun, ain’t it. 
We’re too old and tired and wore slap out, as we say here in the South, to tackle a bathroom rip and rebuild. Good luck to you on your project! I hope everything turns out looking great. That’s what’s so good about that kind of work. It can be back-breaking and frustrating as hell, but the rewards can be magnificent.
Turning back to the topic, let me ask you in all seriousness, respect, and sincerity — how could a single thread discussing aesthetics, morality, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, *and *epistemology possibly stay on track? How would such a thread be manageable? How do you keep people focused on one of the aspects until a consensus is reached? Why isn’t it at least just as good an idea to split them up, to keep the focus on one thing at a time? And why is it any different from SentientMeat’s series, which was at least a dozen separate threads or more. Why didn’t you complain about those?
AGAIN…since you obviously didn’t notice that I was gone for a few years (crushing to my ego), I WAS GONE FOR A FEW YEARS AND WAS NOT AWARE OF THAT. Sheesh.
As to how you could have done it? With the greatest of ease…you start that thread, define your topic and discuss it until consensus is reached and then DISCUSS THE NEXT TOPIC.
Look at that. Everything in the same place. Easy to locate. Even easier to search for little tidbits of verbiage.
No offense guy, but what I’ve said all along is still true, what you have done is post four separate blog posts that are NOT debates in a forum entitled Great Debates. All I said, from the beginning, was that it was a blog rather than a debate. If it had all been enclosed within the same thread, I wouldn’t have near as much of a problem with it. This thread, (if in ONE thread that is) would not be any different tham any other GD thread that I’ve read where rhings don’t get started for pages and pages…and pages…do you see my point NOW?
Telling me, at the instigation of tomndeb, that you just aren’t gonna interact with me no matter what is ridiciulous.
For those of us who weren’t here during SentientMeat’s discussions, I looked some of them up.
Political Compass #1: Globalisation, Humanity and OmniCorp.
Political Compass #2: My country, right or wrong.
Political Compass #3: Pride in one’s country is foolish
etc. with each thread being numbered until
Political Compass #61: Society’s openness about sex is going to far.
and then there were scores for people
Political Compass scores of Straight Dope members.
61 threads all in GD with a scoring system at the end in ATMB seems much more like a blog than 4 posts that were all interrelated but showed different progressions of the same topic. YMobviouslyV.
SentientMeat’s series, you mean? It was a smashing success, and was heralded by many as the greatest series of threads in GD history. If you enjoy political discussions, you can easily find them by searching for SentientMeat in Great Debates for oh, just all the way back. Do it in descending order, and by thread rather than post. Or better yet, just the threads started by Sentient Meat in Great Debates. But the point is that I’m not doing something new here. There is precedence, and it was well received. It is possible that, had you been around, you might have complained about it. But I don’t believe your complaint would have gotten off the ground, really, even though his series was similar to mine in the sense that there were only a few participants, but thousands of views.
Is that how you would like to see every discussion done? Should all the Obama threads be consolidated into one, where people can first discuss his economic plan, and then after that his health plan, and then after that his plans for Afghanistan, and then after that his plan for dealing with Iran’s nuclear development, and then after that his plan for dealing with Kim Jung-Il? If so, why aren’t you complaining? If not, why are you complaining?
That will actually occur in the fifth thread, where the proof is given and debated. But it will be the result of consensus reached by people (like other-wise, MrDibble, FoieGrasIsEvil, etc.) in the prior threads. I simply disagree that meshing aestheics, morality, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology together all in one thread would have been productive, let alone manageable. Can you at least not allow for a simple and respectful disagreement? Must you appeal to the powers that be to implement your idea over mine? Was it necessary that you go off on a mission to have me shut down for no reason other than you disagreed with how I decided to organize the material? If so, then I submit that if this is the worst problem you have, then things are going great for you.
No, sorry, I don’t. Why wouldn’t it still be a blog from your point of view if all of it was crammed into one thread? They were all separate topics. That’s why, as I’ve said all along, I split them into separate threads. But in fact, I did combine some of them. For example, morality and ethics were combined. That’s because they are closely related. Also, metaphysics and ontology were combined. That’s because ontology is a subset of metaphysics. So I did accomodate you, at least in part. It’d be nice if you acknowledged that much.
Yes, it would be. But that’s not what I said. What I said was that if you wanted to engage in the debate, having familiarized yourself with the definitions (which will all be listed, as I’ve said, at the beginning of the debate thread OP) so that no one is talking past each other, you are welcome to join the debate. But, as I said, if you have nothing more to say than “Jesus never existed!”, then I won’t engage you because it is completely outside the scope of the debate. That’s all. And I think that is eminently reasonable.
Wow. I hadn’t realized there were 61 of them. Thank God Xploder was vacant. He might have exploded. 
I would hate to see the level of civility that this thread has reached be jeopardized by any misunderstood badinage.
Hey guy, I’ve been trying to be nice and civilized throughout. Until someone brought up SentientMeats threads, I had no idea that blogging was an accepted practice here. It sure as hell didn’t use to be. Buy hey, like I said in Lib’s thread, your board, your rules. Have fun blogging or whatever you want to call it these days.
Yeah, but did those really count as blogging, per se? Because it wasn’t just Sentient Meat raising his own, well, personal thesis, and having people comment, but rather a series of topics, that EVERYONE participated in.
And it was most definetly a debate.
I’m not going to claim that that does not happen, it does. But there a lot of posters who are smart enough to say at the outset, “This is not about whether God exists, but the manner of Jesus’ execution as it relates to the Bible” (to address Sapo’s point). Those topics get treated with as much respect as one could expect on a message board on the internet and generally stay on track. The problem with your work around is that we have heard it all before and recognize it as the trick-fuck it is. “Let’s not focus on the volcanoes, or the spaceships, or Tom Cruise…” and after excluding every known upcoming defense (or unexplainable nonsense event) then swoop in for the kill. “See, now that we don’t deal with all of that other stuff, NOW doesn’t [my version of religion] make sense?”. Well, sure, now that you’ve tied my hands with your own made up definitions.
All of the above is, of course, beside the point. Even if your method of presenting your case was what the rest of us on the boards considered intellectually honest, it’s still blogging. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike you. In fact I think you are quite intelligent. But having read your posts since before your name change I think you know you are purposely tilting the playing field before the game starts in the threads in question.
Of course he does. He isn’t stupid by any means, he just found a way to post around the rules so that he pretty much has carte blanche in GD.
You’re wrong on both counts. It is not the case that “EVERYONE” participated. You didn’t, for example. And I dropped out after trying to debate the very validity of the test, and being told that that wasn’t what we were there for.
It was a poll, if anything. People were asked to give the score they received from the test, and then comment on it. That’s what people did. The only “debates” that took place were people who, like me, popped in to say that the test was biased to the left, which SentientMeat readily conceded, saying in his first OP that conservatives might tend to see it that way.
In any case, what mattered most was the score. That’s why, the at end of it all, Sentient Meat compiled all the scores of those who participated (even those who came in very late and posted their scores in, say, thread number 52), and posted those composite scores here in ATMB.
You are also wrong that SentientMeat did not exposit his own thesis. He did. In fact, in every case he did — in the OP of every single one of the 61 threads. A few of the threads drew in new people, but Shodan, erislover, and a couple others were the main participants throughout. But for quite some time, most of the debate was what the debate was about. And I was mostly contributing to that.
Most of the (early) responses were like this one, from RickJay:
+0.75, -5 (or something like that.)
I’d have to check “strongly disagree” here, which I might not have ten years ago. I’ve become somewhat suspicious of all things nationalist.
I love my country (Canada) and really believe it’s perhaps the best country in the world to live in, but being willing to admit we’re wrong about things is one of the reasons it IS such a nice place to live. The Jesuits say an unexamined faith isn’t worth anything; I happen to believe they were right, and that an unexamined patriotism is even worse than useless. Unswerving, blind allegiance to a flag is no difference than unswerving, blind allegiance to a religion or a race, which as we all know are things that make the world, well, so much more exciting.
I wonder if this would not be a more productive thread if we were to rewrite the question; the authors of the test seemed to write it from a very left wing perspective and didn’t ascribe intelligence or subtlety to anyone with different views.
That was in the second thread. And SentientMeat’s responsewas this:
They are not questions, they are propositions; “I support my country right or wrong” is clearly a proposition strongly biased towards authoritarianism, which is why I, a social liberal, Strongly Disagree.
I repeat, these propositions are biased; all the better to assess your personal reaction to them. Because they are propositions, not questions, I still hold that the test is valid.
He was attempting to steer the thread in the direction he wanted it to go. In fact, he made a declaratation of what the series was all about in [this post](These threads are purely an attempt at a rigorous exploration of our personal political orientations. As the site itself says, “some of the questions may niggle” and it is all too easy to poke holes in every single question, but I still feel that by ticking with your gut instinct you get an accurate assessment of your views.):
These threads are purely an attempt at a rigorous exploration of our personal political orientations.
(My emphasis)
In other words, this was a poll. Most of the arguments that ensued were not about the issues at all, but about the test and its validity, much like it had become in my fourth thread when PBear began to argue about the validity of my source, the Book of John.
And so, will all due respect, Guin, I think you might have shot from the hip on this one without really checking out the series. Participation was limited to a core of people, with other people dropping in and out along the way. Now, you might add them all up and say, “He had, in total, more different participants than you do,” but I have done only 6% of the number of threads he had done. If I did 61 of them, it is reasonable to assume that my number of different participants might approach his. My current thread alone has had 22 particpants (including you).
Then we’ll just skip that.
The rest of us? The rest of us? I appreciate that you do not dislike me, and I appreciate your admitting a bias stemming from seven years ago. But I cannot accept that you speak for the whole board when, in fact, there are people participating exactly in the spirit of the threads as they were intended. I think people like MrDibble, other-wise, FoieGrasIsEvil, PBear, and Duhkecco would be surprised to learn that they are not posters in good standing of the StraightDope message board, and are not part of “the rest of us”. Not to mention people who have supported me in THIS thread, like Shodan.
Blogging, to me, is writing out a thesis and then allowing people to comment on it. I haven’t even written out a thesis yet. I mean, on a few occasions when people dropped in to ask what I would eventually claim, I let them know what my thesis WILL be. What we have been doing all along is developing a consensus on our terms and how they will be used. That’s not blogging. That’s hashing out what we mean by what we say so that we won’t be arguing past each other when the debate begins. What’s wrong with that? I think it’s a good thing when people understand what each other are saying.
You might think that it’s okay when debates descend into chaos simply because no one understood that by “goodness” I mean “the edification of two or more free moral agents”. How in the world can there be a debate if each person is using a different definition of the terms? And there are many such terms.
And they (the threads) were divided into distinct areas of philosophy so that we could stay focused on one area before moving to the next. And when Part V finally opens, it will open with an hypothesis, a set of definitions, a set of premises, and a set of inferences until the last inference, which will be the conclusion that, hopefully, matches my hypothesis. And everyone will be (and has been) invited to enjoin that debate in order to argue whether I have successfully proven what I set out to prove.
And THAT is not a blog either. So, you can just stop with the blog business. And while we’re at it, people who think the admins treat me somehow special are so far off base as to be ridiculous. I have undergone suspensions, warnings, PMs telling me that I skirted a line, and even e-mails from admins advising me that particular complaints I had made had no standing. So, no, I am NOT the teacher’s pet. If anything, I’m a thorn in their sides. But none of them — not one — has lodged any sort of warning, caution, or complaint about my current series of threads. Zero. I assure you that, if they had something to say about it, they would let me know.
And one more thing, most of the posts in this thread have been onesy-twosey drive-bys, with the exceptions of Marley23 (who has posted the most), Xploder and Fenris (who are second and third respectively, with Fenris off an a whole 'nother topic about something Tom had done), and me (with 15 now), and Tom with 13. Eveybody else is in single digits as of this writing. And so it is not the case that there is some general uprising of the whole board wishing to put a stop to my project (which is nearly completed now).
Why can’t you few people just live and let live?
Therefore, it was a debate about the test and its validity.
Damn short edit window…grumble grumble…
re your post #213: The rest of us is clearly hyperbole. I don’t see anyone admitting to a bias.
You know that now that tomndeb has made a point of letting you do what you want to, no other mod is then gonna come along and say “nope, he was wrong”.
I didn’t mean to accuse you of thread shitting or anything of the like. I was just addressing in general terms what was then the current detour the thread had taken.
As another general observation, I think that what might be tripping some people is the idea that in GD you must come with a position to defend and fight for it to death. You know, debate. What I think Liberal is wanting to do (or at least what I have wanted to do in past occasions) is to come with an idea and want to have it fine tuned by the input of others, define terms, find holes in it, etc. It does require some level of willingness to cooperate from the other participants and it might mean that he won’t have the right comeback for every objection. He is not there to win a fight but to build something (or to have it methodically demolished). Is this a valid use for GD? Opinions vary, of course.
As for the matter of serial threads vs a single consolidated thread. Whatever. In the end all it means is that there will always be a Liberal thread. Whether it is THE Liberal thread or the Liberal-2607 thread is not of particular relevance. The old threads will sink quickly and not waste your electrons.
And my threads, thus far, have been debates (despite the clearly marked witnessing notices) about my definitions and interpretations. The new thread will be a debate about whether I have sufficiently proved my thesis — a debate, by the way that I’ve invited you to enjoin so long as you understand and use the terms as they have been defined by the rest of us over the course of the past several weeks. If that interests you, then great! We’ll see you there. If it doesn’t interest you, then you are certainly free to speak your peace in the thread. I’m not a mod, and I can’t stop your from chiming in with “How do you know Jesus said that?” (a matter we’ve covered in excruciating detail already.) But if you want to debate points of my thesis, you can be assured that I will respond to you. I’ve told you this several times already. And I mean it.
You’ve got it right. But the fine tuning often involved debate. As with this postby Voyager, for example, in the Morality and Ethics thread:
I’'m with your distinction between ethics and morality. However, I’m not sure if I agree with your definition of ethics. [etc.]
That is most definitely a debate response. And my response to him was that he had made some good points, and that maybe the definitions should be revised. And so on it went, until a consensus was reached on the meanings of the terms “morality” and “ethics”. That’s very important in a discussion about Jesus, a major figure in world religion. I just wanted to point out that defining the terms wasn’t something I dictated. (Though sometimes, I would offer a definition that would be unopposed — even outright supported, as in my definition of “belief”, which I took straight out of the Amplified Bible.)
Nitpick: when I said everyone, Lib, I didn’t mean it literally.