I have seen this call to action several times. I’ve also remarked before that I find it a bit distasteful. I realize it is unpleasant to have shit flying all over the place(especially when the ventilation gets involved) but the goal of promoting a open dialogue for all on any topic is more important to me than the flying fecal matter. Some will abuse this privelege and use their time and energy to sling crap instead of engaging in substance, but overall this is a small number of people and they are easily ignored. The bigger problem is refusal to engage in actual discourse and instead simply repeating talking points over and over. The shit-slinging causes hurt feelings, but the evasions, weaseling, and refusal to engage honestly in the topic at hand are what make so many of the Great Debates threads such wastes of time.
I endeavor to keep from throwing feces myself for the sake of preserving the ability to engage on substantitive matters with the many intelligent and informed participants here. Occasionally, however, I feel the target is particularly deserving, in which case I reserve the right to chuck a little crapola their way.
Fair enough. If you don’t want to tell folks on your side of the fence to stop, however, at least you shouldn’t defend their actions, which is what Sam seems to be doing.
Bricker, you know I’ve got a lot of respect for you, and it’s not like I have any claim to perfection on or off these boards (I’ve got a tendency to get wayyy angry at people sometimes, something that’s not a good thing). And the fact that you sometimes stoop to a level that I wish you didn’t stoop to isn’t going to make me lose that respect. I just wish you didn’t do it: it’s easy for me to ignore (for example) milroyj’s idiot partisan jabs, but I’m not in the habit of ignoring your posts.
It would help your case if Collounsbury hadn’t turned out to be wrong about almost everything.
You know, like the civil war that was supposed to happen, the supposed instability in Kurdish regions in Turkey, Turkish troops marching into northern Iraq, the rise of the ‘Arab Street’, which was going to seethe with so much hatred for America that dictators would be emboldened and consolidate power, the Islamic theocracy that would rise in Iraq, assuming it didn’t split apart into civil war… Didn’t he also claim that the people of Iraq would rise up against the Americans? Today there are protests in Iraq, but guess what they’re protesting? Syrian involvement in Lebanon, and Jordanian militants coming into their country.
In case you haven’t noticed, the neo-cons have been doing a fair bit of gloating recently, and newpapers across the world have been asking, “Were the neo-cons right?” Including some very hostile papers like Der Spiegel and The Guardian.
It’s still early in the Middle East transformation process, and much could go wrong. But at this point, to suggest that the neo-cons were wrong isn’t just premature, it’s stupid. All of the early indications are pointing in favor of the neo-con position.
Fair enough, with two caveats. I don’t claim either side of the “fence” as my own. In the words of the great Treebeard, I am not alltogether on anyone’s side because no one is alltogether on my side. I care more about issues and principles than labels/group identities or individual politicians. I may be on the “left” side of the fence about certain issues and on the “right” side of the fence on the other. I suspect a rather large number of people, even some fairly staunch partisans, break ranks at some point. Second caveat, I reserve the right to fling feces at the same person currently under brownish bombardment if and only if, in my own judgement, that person deserves (sh)it.
It may sound like I’m just arguing for an environment where the fecal matter flies all the time, but these have always been my own personal rules and I am not exactly the most noted shit-flinger around. I daresay it would be difficult to find even a single percent of my posts that would qualify.
Can you point to a single instance where December spewed vitriol at anyone? He was one of the most polite members of this board, at least until the very end when he was pushed to the end of his rope and he started playing games with the opposition.
See, even here you can’t help yourself, and have to resort to telling half-truths in order to make your opponents look worse.
The truthful aspect of your post was the fact that december was, in fact, formally very polite, and did not resort to personal insults or rank vitriol.
But your disingenuousness shows in the last part of your post, which implies that he was some sort of rational, well-meaning innocent who was “pushed to the end of his rope” by evil lefties. Despite his formal politeness, december was a blatant shit-stirrer who did everything he could to offend people while maintaining a demeanour of childlike innocence. That you could attempt to portray him as someone who was only driven to “playing games” by an intractable opposition says much about your own sense of what constitutes reasonable behavoiur.
I’m not going to invoke the names of long dead posters here to try to prove a point about who started it. But as a person who has both strong feelings to the right on some issues and equally strong feelings to the left on others, I have to agree that there’s a bit more crap-flinging towards Republicans on this board. Like it or not, we do better at recognizing crap being flung from the other side, and I think that most SDMB’ers do indeed tend to give more room to leftish posters, so I can understand why a lot of rightish posters feel “persecuted” and may indeed snap back.
Again, this wasn’t one of Bricker’s finest moments, but it wasn’t like he advocated eating babies or something of that order. It was a moderately inappropriate post. He has acknowledged this and apologised, and posters like him and Sam Stone are willing to work harder to be less ad hominem in the future.
Can’t we just do the same and get over this less than spectacular pitting?
I just can’t see the value in these endless arguments about which side is flinging more shit. But seriously, in as much as some people are going to sling shit in almost any forum like this, doesn’t it make sense that “the left” would sling more shit in a time when “the right” is in power in the US? I wasn’t around here during the Clinton years, and maybe this MB was smaller and more civil, but I suspect “the right” was slinging a lot of shit back then. Was that the case back in the late 90s?
Bingo! Exactly right. Whether or not one cares about the amount of shit being flung, surely this explains the reason for any discrepancy that might exist.
Also, i believe that the membership of this board tends towards the liberal/Democratic end of what passes for a political spectrum in the US. If this is the case—and conservatives are constantly compaining about how the board is dominated by the left—then surely simple probability suggests that there will be more shit-slingers on the left than on the right?
Simple math, folks. If i have 100 Democrats and 20 Republicans in a room, and after a count i find that 15 of the Democrats are left-handed, and three of the Republicans are left-handed, i can’t conclude from this evidence that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to be left-handed.
I wasn’t here either. But if the conservative members of the boards at that time held beliefs about Clinton even vaguely similar to their media and political counterparts, you can guess the answer to your question.
I was around, and it was certainly true that there were a LOT of Clinton-bashing threads back then. There were also a lot more Republicans on this board. I can remember people complaining that this board tilted to the right. I honestly can’t remember what the tone of the debate was like then, however. I don’t recall whether there were a lot of personal attacks. Perhaps the Republicans at the time were just as bad, but I didn’t notice it as much because it wasn’t directed at me.
This board stayed pretty much centrist, with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, right up until the Iraq war. Then two things happened - one is that some Republicans switched sides due to opposition to the war (especially true of a number of Libertarians on the board who normally sided with Republicans in most economic/philosophical arguments). The other is that a number of folks on the anti-war side became extremely abusive, and for some reason the mods tolerated it. In my opinion, this caused a lot of conservative posters to simply get sick of it and leave. Some are still here, but no longer participate in Great Debates. That skewed GD even further to the left, leading to pile-on parties and the rest.
I think this dynamic is what polarizes the internet in the first place - it’s rare to find a board where all viewpoints are welcome. Most boards are moderated poorly, and as a result as soon as one side gains a numerical advantage it tends to run the other side off. That’s why I thought it was so sad to see that happen here - until then, the SDMB was one place where all viewpoints could be heard and debated fairly. As of late it’s been improving, and maybe we’ll get back to the balance we had before, but for a while there it was no different than the Democratic Underground or Free Republic. You either accepted the viewpoint of the majority as revealed wisdom of the ages, or you could prepare to be insulted and mocked.