I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s noticed, but off-topic threads trading barbs has reached an annoying level. Part of this is due to some conservative commenters who add little of substance and can’t resist inflaming others in whatever they say. But all BMG conservatives are not created equal, and we do some of them an injustice by lumping them altogether.
JohnD is one of the conservative BMGers who, in my opinion, doesn’t deserve the scorn he’s receiving. Click on his name and look at his archive. JohnD has contributed more than 250 diaries. I’m talking about posts, not comments. Then click on your own name. How does your record compare to JohnD’s? How many BMG liberals can claim such a record? I’ve been on BMG almost from the beginning. I’ve got 119 diaries under my name, and 93 under an alias I once used. KBusch has 94 posts. MethuenProgressive has 93. (To put these numbers in perspective, David has made 3625 posts, Bob has made 1899 Posts, Charley has made 2174). My point is that diaries are the bread and butter of BMG. Without them, there are no comments.
Writing a diary isn’t equivalent to be a valuable member of the BMG community. Plenty of people comment, stimulate conversation, and make me (at least) think. I’m not saying everyone has to write a diary to be constructive. I’m just asking that we liberals use more discretion as we deal with our conservatives. Are they all trolls? A troll is,
someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community… with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.The noun troll may refer to the provocative message itself, as in: “That was an excellent troll you posted.”
Almost everyone here is guilty of posting inflammatory or off-topic comments at some point. Sometimes doing so is fun. Sometimes it is instructive. Unfortunately, the troll content of some conservative comments is high. In the absence of comment ratings, which allow readers to disapprove of comments and helps alleviate the compulsion to respond, we can either ignore the troll, which is akin to doing a stand-up comedy act and ignoring a heckler, or abuse them. What we shouldn’t do, however, is treat every ideologically opposed comment as the grunt of a troll. And although we end up feeding a hungry troll on occasion, we should also take care not to bait him.
trolls in my own way, thank you.
has every right to impose his or her views on others – and every other citizen has an equal right to tell him or her to take a running jump.
–Richard Smyth
I perceive a change in the dynamic since the adoption of the new site. I do not know if the change is at all related to the the adoption of the new software or to the lack of “rating” and the change may have preceding the new software.
In any event, a number of valuable conservative contributors have fallen away, and have not been replaced, to the overall site’s cost. Most importantly, peter porcupine. gary. There was also a guy, whose name I forget, who was as arrogant as all-get-out, used the word “orthogonal” a lot, tended to support liberal positions, but with rather hard-headed conservative arguments, and seems to have split his time living with his husband in Massachusetts and Germany. I would also put the guy from redmassgroup in this category, though doubtless many of you would call him/her a simple troll.
In their place has come a series of RamRockRadio types who do little except to display their extraordinary ignorance for the world to see and ridicule. And the atmosphere here has changed as well, such that commenters like johnd are far more likely to attract self-appointed troll police, who define trolls as “people who disagree with me.”
The overall result is far less interesting content on the site, and far more “Elizabeth Rules, Scott Drools” and “Romney is Teh Suck” postings that are so fundamentally uninteresting. I know that my own participation here has declined as a result of the decline in actual diversity herein.
was that it?
Thank you. That was bugging the heck out of me.
He pissed me off no end, but never with bullshit nonsense.
No idea what happened to him, but he left way before the software upgrade. I agree that he was a good participant.
According to Raj’s bio, he has a medical condition known as “selective mutism” which might explain it. Maybe too many women started posting here and he went mute.
Not sure where gary went, but he too left long before the software changed. Not sure what’s up with PP. The quills still come out occasionally, but less frequently than before.
We are expecting comment rating to be back quite soon…
Porcupine is not well, physically speaking.
Gary and geo99 were quite abrasive but quite substantive. Gary knows stuff about economics, too, by which I don’t mean Austrian “economics”.
I’m not sure if people just happened to leave when the format changed. I find it harder to follow a conversation, which is what made BMG worthwhile. I’d ignore some posts and dig into others, and without the old comment interface it just isn’t worth it to me.
I’m not sure we have too many trolls here, but we do have many unoriginal writers. From the left and the right, and once those hit a critical mass, there isn’t much here that couldn’t be read elsewhere in a cleaner, easier format. It’s tough to write about, say, energy policy is half the comments will be about one side’s obvious superiority.
I do recognize some people have taken it upon themselves to lead the attack on Brown or defense of Warren considering this Senate race is rather important on the national scheme. It just crowds out other things.
Seriously. Because JohnD made the following claim:
In his pathetic attach on my President, and yet, the very first word in the “supposedly unedited quote” was “[L]ook” in which the word “look” was changed to “[L]ook” because that was not the beginning of the sentence and this the brackets are an Editor’s way of making such an Edit.
As such, I believe I am within my right to point out this fraud when it occurs and deliberately shame the fraud(Troll) in the process. I don’t care how much text has been generated by the fraudster. I could not disagree more and believe JohnD is deserving of whatever he is receiving now. If this become the means by which I am prevented from having an account here, then I am Sparticus! Boo Fricken Hoo.
I was thinking of that very thread. He pointed out a circumstance in which OUR president said a stupid thing, and on which he deserves to be called out for saying a stupid thing. It has been 4 years, he’s not supposed to be a rookie anymore. He suggested a phrasing that would actually convey the idea that our president was failing to convey, without requiring V-8 head slaps.
In response, we talked about birtherism. The person who steered the conversation to discuss “birtherism” was… you.
Which is to say, you are a nitwit.
not to censure anyone. I had no one in particular in mind when I wrote this. I’m not an editor and have no power to prevent anyone from having an account. People will comment as they see fit. No one’s stopping you.
My point was to get people to think about how they are communicating. The question, for me anyway, is how we call people out. I’ve called one person in particular out lately, but when he wasn’t being an idiot, I tried to respond in kind.
Many conservatives have taken Obama’s speech and cut/pasted parts of his speech to make it look worse. Much like Andrea Mitchell did with Mitt Romney or NBC did with the Zimmerman/Martin taped 911 calls. I intentionally left it intact and this is how I defined “no edits”. I did not say “here is his entire speech”. I’m sorry of my definition of “no edits” made you think I was lying which I wouldn’t since anyone can verify his entire speech with a few keystrokes.
What the difference between that and “all of what Obama said”?
like some Republicans have, or Andrea Mitchell…
Did you really want to hear the rest of the speech which had nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I think you’re nitpicking around this issue.
Should include wingnuttery?
“Does he [Obama] have to diminish their sacrifice, their investment, their sweat… ? None of us would be here without our parents so do we all owe our success to our parents? Our computers wouldn’t work without electricity, power plants wouldn’t work without oil so do successful businesses owe their success to Exxon? Stop with the success precursors…What a bunch of crap from Obama!”
First of all, he didn’t diminish anything by acknowledging the cooperative aspects of success – success as a social good. It is the cureent right wing ideologues who have fostered this notion that anyone who isn’t a so-called job creator is a slacker, sponging off of some guv’mnt dole paid for by the job creator. In this context, Obama’s remarks were perfectly appropriate. Just listen to Romney’s utter arrogance on the matter of his own success, which clearly he defines as nothing more or less than the accumulation of wealth.
” Some guy/woman saves their money to buy a small business, risks it all and makes it. HOW does that person get any help? The roads and the country infrastructure is available to all Americans as we all pay for it (at least the 50% of Americans who pay taxes). Somebody else helped them… get off it! Is it so hard to give people credit for making it? finding it? Discovering it? Inventor Ben Franklin… no biggie if out wasn’t for Archimedes of Syracuse. Can’t Obama see these incredible people making a killing as doing it on their own?”
This is nothing more than right-wing raving. When did Obama deny the success of Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, the Silicon Valley moguls? When? Never. Yet johnD sees fit to essentially say that the bottom half of the people in this country are a bunch of lazy, stupid mooches because no one but him is clamoring for them to pay more in taxes. Outrageous.
“Obama is missing the point about personal success and the initiative and desire which drives individuals. Go take your 401K money out and start a business, take that gamble and if you succeed then you did it. Be proud… I would be proud of you. But don’t confuse this working hard with a guy digging a ditch as working hard. The ditch digger is just labor. Hard work is over rated, I’ll take smart work over hard work any day!”
“The ditch digger is just labor.” Well, there it is, isn’t it? The meritocracy has come knockin’ for its pound of flesh. I’m guessing john doesn’t know which end of a shovel to hold because he has people for that. Yet someone has to dig his ditch, and that someone has to make a living and feed their family and raise their kids to do better than having to dig ditches for a living. Obama gets it alright – he knows what it means to be an american. I have my doubts about johnD.
“Of course we are a nation and we do many things together. 911 is a great example of how we can come together when we have to. Sadly, it takes something as terrible as 911 to make this happen.”
If john is expecting us to rally around the carried interest clause in the tax code as a celebratory paean to smart work performed by the meretricious elite who continue to demand more maybe he should consider an appropriate response to these John Galt types when they really screw up, crash the global economy, and then expect and demand the ditch diggers to bail them out.
This guy is a troll.
I think these were fair questions. Of course they are not what the president meant, but that is what he said. The president’s inability to make what he means correspond with what he says opens the door to questioning what he means. This could be an occasion for a discussion of what he meant, and what he SHOULD mean, or it could be an occasion for a denunciation.
One is interesting, and one is not.
and thought it was clearly stated by Obama with solid backup. Just because john repeated it over and over again doesn’t make it real.
Just happen to be Democrats in campaign mode, who can’t ever even acknowledge that their guy put his foot in it, lest they get off message. As if they are in the campaign, rather than the target of the campaign. And who, can also never admit that the other guy misspeaking– or singing in a bad key, or whatever, isn’t the crystallization of all of the evils and character flaws of 50% of the electorate.
Which result in never-ending streams of “I heart Obama” and “Romney is Evil Evil Pure Evil” posts.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Maybe this puts the point on it. Previously, BMG was a left wing observer of politics and policy; BMG has now become more of a part of the Democratic campaign. The signal to noise ratio has thus declined, as discussion has been replaced by campaigning.
and that really is your problem.
BMG is run by Democrats????
Shit! I was fooled all along!!!
Come on. The post was dumb all around. You are moving away from it with your comments with an overall post complaint. But in this instance, the post was dumb. it just is.
The emphasis placed on it is interesting though with posts here, that in some way is entertaining. This is it, that’s what you got, kind of thought. But in all honesty, I think you got this example backwards.
Mitt has been hammered here, but guess what, there’s a lot of material and Mitt has created it himself.
is not out of context on purpose. They whole thing is fucking stupid.
You don’t have to agree with him (I didn’t), but he took a sincere shot at saying something. Rather than getting all ad hominem on him, however, I tried to think about how and why he might think as he does and how I could prove otherwise. Frankly, I didn’t really come up with a satisfactory response.
IMO are based on a deliberate misreading of the speech for the sole purpose of contriving a counter-argument to a non-existent premise. It was insincere.
agreed.
Deliberate misrepresentation of what the President said is not sincerity. He may sincerely believe in his positions, but his arguments are dishonest.
Media Matters, on how johnd came to believe nonsense:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/18/report-fox-news-spends-two-plus-hours-distortin/187202
I think the definition of “troll” should be expanded to include, “Someone who deliberately causes an exchange of comments to veer off into inaptness, irrelevance, and inanity.” You can see this happening over and over again at BMG. It’s a sort of Gresham’s Law. The core issue morphs into discussion about the troll’s trolling. The remedy for this is the equivalent of”Quaker Shunning” (“To remove or limit the influence of a member (or former member) over other members in a community. This approach may seek to isolate, to discredit, or otherwise dis-empower such a member, often in the context of actions or positions advocated by that member.”) This seems to me compatible with the unwritten rule of progressive blogging, which is to enhance literacy, civility, and community.
I do not know if any of our conservatives are consistently trolls. The example that comes to mind is when JohnD says we all hate rich people even though we’ve gone over the distinctions between wealth per se and the values that sometimes attach to it over and over and over again. I prefer to say, “That was a trollish comment,” rather than “[so and so] is a troll.” I’m often accused of feeding a troll because I hate to let them have the last word lest it look like we have no response, though ratings would help and I do less than I otherwise would because IE won’t allow nested comments on this platform.
respond – don’t respond – ban
and all its nuances and permutations.
One way to look at it may be to ask ourselves the following when confronted with a post:
Does this seem to be a genuine attempt at dialogue and debate or are there enough buzz-words, trojan horses and false-positives embedded in it to know it is an attempt to hijack the discourse. As a progressive board, we should be able to informally arrive at a few agreed upon standards, shared beliefs and cultural imperatives, without creating the dreaded “manifesto.”
I am not a nitwit, my mother had me tested. Bazinga!
a ditch digger 🙂
I am touched if most of you want me to, I will surely thing about it.
I wrote this post because I wanted people to think about the way they were communicating, not to make up rules (which I don’t have the authority to do) or tell people what to do. Doing a post like this also helps keep these META conversations from contaminating other threads.
I mentioned posting because it demonstrated JohnD’s seriousness. There are a lot of BMGers who have done few posts–Christopher, for example–who make good contributions with comments.
The Editors have chosen not to blacklist people on BMG, and I like to think of BMG as a free-market of ideas. The number of posts doesn’t mean anyone is automatically worthwhile.
If you are looking for my advice, I’d say try not to inflame people so much when you make a point. Try to understand what someone is trying to say. As you know, I don’t refrain from zinging people, but I try to only do so when warranted.
RATINGS. I’m not sure whether ratings helped much or not because they certainly did cause flame wars all of their own — particularly when peevish people would apply zeros to every comment from someone. Again, unless there is a way to reward good comments we disagree with, disagreement will always be accompanied by disagreeableness. Amazon’s product reviews, for example, got much more useful when they started highlighting the best positive and negative review.
EDITORS. The editors live by and large on the front page — as the posting statistics attest. Most of their comments, too, are the italicized introductions to front-paged posts. The rest of us, even those of us who contribute a lot of diaries, live mostly in the threads. So something that keenly affects, say, Mark Bail’s experience of the site is barely noticed, if at all, by Bob Neer.
SELF-SELECTION. Many of the liberals who post on Red Mass Group do not cover themselves in glory. In fact, they’re often kind of annoying. Posting substantively among those that disagree with you vehemently can be done in various ways: It can be done carefully with a lot of work, or it can be done just to attract attention, or it can be done to let one enjoy the exhilaration of lobbing insults. We hardly ever get the first kind. Who has that kind of time? But we do get a lot of attention-seekers and insult-lobbers. Skewl Zombie anyone?
A few times a week I’ll start a comment and then not post it. Either because I really didn’t have anything to add or it wasn’t very nice.
The Editors are promising comments soon. Without them, it feels like being heckled, rather than trolled.
… and not just on this blog. I find that when I weigh in with a comment, I want to do so with evidence and citations. The result is often that I jump in to start a comment and then abandon it on the basis of ‘I don’t have the time to get sucked into this.’ I’ve probably weighed in more on healthcare reform than other subjects probably because my familiarity with sources to cite is unusually high on that particular subject.
I probably start a comment only to abandon it 5 to 10 times a week (maybe once or twice on this site).
And the mantra we have to keep in mind constantly is “don’t give attention to behaviors you don’t like.” Attention is affirming – positive or negative. Behaviors you attend to increase, while those you ignore diminish. Same rule applies for trolls. Hard as it is in practice sometimes, don’t react, don’t call the annoying poster a troll, don’t engage. If there is no attention or reaction whatsoever to be had here from dumb, inflammatory comments, they will decrease.
cf Stephen Colbert
Affirming positive behavior :).
So you’re saying fight trollism with clicker training?? 🙂
AS you mentioned, none of us can claim perfection in our performance on BMG. I should have been banned from BMG when I started but thankfully the editors stuck with me.
Thanks to some supportive comments from some people and they are hitting on something I’ve tried to do over the last few years by introducing some controversial subjects and ideas, but it difficult because people who disagree with them try to attack me or dismiss the ideas outright.
To those who think my diary about Obama’s remarks were trollish and contrived or were just plain dumb, I disagree. Obama said those things and I believe it is in line with his previous remarks about business. BTW, it wsn’t that long ago that Mitt Romney was talking about how he would treat a company providing inferior service to him in this competitive business world by saying “I like firing people”. I seem to remember a whole bunch of people jumping not he bandwagon here about how Romney “like to fire people” meaning he wants to fire everybody when he clearly was talking about replacing companies who provide substandard service with better companies. Right?
I will continue posting here and I will offer and respond to comments with a truthful heart felt answer. And as much as I believe in the words from someone above who said “ignore bad behavior” I will say that I sometimes get snarky when others get snarky to me. I hope the editors here will enforce the rules so no name calling or ad him remarks are tolerated. Some of my brethren here can get excited and write/think instead of think/write but there are many liberals here who are just as guilty but I think feel empowered to do so since it is BLUE Mass Group.
And for some who don’t know of me, I grew up in Dorchester from as blue collared a family as you can get, I’d say middle class but it might be better defined as “lower” middle class. Thanks for letting me participate here.
That is precisely the right analog in the other direction. Like Obama’s comment, this is a great example of the candidate not saying exactly what he meant– and in both instances meaning something that isn’t particularly controversial.
I will disagree with you that Obama meant anything other than that the hard work of an entrepreneur or businessperson is necessary but not sufficient for the creation of a success. The hard work must be on fertile ground, which requires, among other things, education, physical infrastructure, and a commercial system relatively free of corruption. If these things were not necessary, Google would have been created in Rwanda.
If you only look at the Romney attack ad, you’d get a different story.
It seems more likely to me that the difference is on the part of the student, not the teacher.
Teachers help you when you are at a point where you are ready to use their instruction fully.
In any case as I said on that thread, both views are just abstractions. I agree that there are valuable parts to Obama’s abstraction, but in our country the Romney view is 100 times more useful and definitely more important right now.
For example we have had people retooling and taking on their own education for five years and it hasn’t produced an explosion of new products or processes.
Nobody takes their tax cuts and expands business in a declining market. Similarly, nobody with tax burdens eschews expansion in the face of an expanding market.
I specifically did not omit any sentences.
I am ignoring this troll.
I haven’t found your input very enlightening nor constructive. Most of your remarks are snarky and often are personal attacks such as today when you called someone you disagreed with a “moron”.
Please ignore all my comments since you do nothing to advance the ball on most subjects.
kind of a jerk here?
I am not going to reply to this comment.
Any discussion that claims to be based on reality might as well start off with each participant claiming exclusive knowledge of the mind of God. Political opinions are formed primarily by personal experience and the fact is that the vast majority of Americans do not consider themselves liberals.
I am not saying that being a liberal is wrong, or wrong for you, or not useful. But anybody who claims the mantle of “reality-based” will inevitably have to attack those who disagree not as people in possession of different experiences but as stupid.
In addition, the slightly satirical treatment of the phrase does not show proper respect for whichever evil genius coined it, and turned out to be right all along. They really did create a new reality while we were trying to figure out the old one, and we are still living with the results. That alone should be enough to make us cautious.
Surly there are actual fact that can be discerned in the world, no? Surly different assertions and arguments can have varying degrees of factual backup to their foundation, no? To the extent that dependency on this factual backup can be established, arguments can be said to be more or less based on facts – at least when compared to each other, no?
I’m not willing to abscond with objective reality in service to democratic principals. Those that do are not intellectually honest and I happen to be of the opinion that a basis in reality is one of those ‘must haves’ for policy (in general) to give us genuine progress. The alternative is the progress of denialism, probably best (and granted, most absurdly) exemplified in North Korea.
and I mean very respectfully. I think our country is at the point where we can’t even agree on facts, or supporting facts, or even using statistics as a supporting point.
I could make ten factual statements right now, and people would jump on them and say they are incorrect, or another group might jump on them and say they are really opinions.
Here’s an example. ‘The more you pay out in unemployment, the more likely people are to stay unemployed.” I have been hearing both sides of this since the recession hit, plus about a dozen collateral arguments like “the effect on the economy of not getting paid would be worse, it’s a form of stimulus, my company paid in anyway, it’s a way for people to re-tool, yada yada. All I know is that $650 a week is the highest in the country, and if you had two kids in day care and lost your job, you come out ahead if you make less than $75K a year. Please don’t debate this, I’m just using it as an example.
I also would take an issue with using history to support any conclusion. For example the idea that the US Congress was once a great place where people concerned only about what was good for the country got together and did important things is completely wrong (fact or opinion?) The idea that somehow today it’s worse is not really compared to anything. Is it worse than the time when Southern committee chairman controlled everything, or when Congress refused to give women the right to vote? That line could go on as well. I only suggest it’s highlighted now because of the budget crisis, but I keep hearing people pining for the good old days.
I try to only comment on politics here instead of policy because I think it’s unlikely that any amount of facts and citations could be mustered to change the mind of anyone with a strong opinion.
That’s not what happens on BMG… and it would be really boring for the users if it was. The reality-based thing is just a weapon used against commenters who are not in agreement.
Just say it’s Democrats Central and nobody would mind.
The GOP stopped caring about facts somewhere around the time that Ronald Reagan started promoting his voodoo economics.
The GOP sees the virtual unanimous agreement of credentialed climatologists about AGW, and the similarly unanimous flood of peer-reviewed publications showing why, and concludes that all those scientists themselves are corrupt “liberals” who are participating in a vast liberal scam to destroy democracy.
The “facts” tossed out by the right wing are all too often either outright lies or else egregious distortions that have been rebutted over and over.
With all due respect to merrimackguy, his apparent claim that $650/week is too high exemplifies my point. That amount ($650/week) translates to $33,800 year — and that’s IF it ran for 52 weeks. In fact, it currently stops after 26 weeks. So the current unemployment package totals $16,900/year.
Then he writes: “you come out ahead if you make less than $75K a year. Please don’t debate this, I’m just using it as an example.”
Say WHAT????
On what planet can $16,900 cause you to “come out ahead” if you started at, say $70,000?
This is pure unadulterated horse manure. Are we supposed to treat garbage like this with respect if a mob is stupid enough to believe it?
Sorry, but I insist that facts are facts and that we make SOME attempt to tie facts together with logic.
where’s the “Like” button???
Lots of people collected unemployment for 99 weeks, So 52 weeks times $650 would be a good amount for one year. In MA you would get an extra $25 for each kid, so that would put you at 36,400 for the year. If you put your kids in daycare, two small ones would cost $35-40K depending on location. The tax break is only $5,000 so you’d have to earn significantly more gross to pay that net. So assuming you’re okay watching your own kids, you’re ahead.
Why is $450 a week max okay in NY? I’m not making a judgement that it’s too high in MA, I’m only using it as an example of what many people consider a “fact” is not actually a fact.
I’m not making any of this up. I’ve gone over these numbers with a close relative who actually thought this through.
Why does everyone have to mention GOP & global warming together? You’re going to paint everyone on that side with the same brush?
!
Leaving aside the question of extended benefits for the moment, one year at $650/week is $33,800. That’s a long way from $75K. Unemployment compensation is high in Massachusetts because, among other things, daycare costs are high in Massachusetts. I know this is hard to believe, but not every unemployed worker has children in daycare. Even for those that do, you seem to be suggesting that those children should be punished if the employer of their mom or dad lays them off. Is that what you mean?
The “facts” you cite are just barely facts, and cherry-picked ones at that. Here are some more facts. Extended benefits expire for EVERYONE in Massachusetts in December of this year. That means 26 weeks, period. An unemployed 50-something executive or middle-manager with teenagers has a mortgage, upcoming college expenses, and a difficult time getting re-hired in a corporate culture that equates “young” with “good”. Among the hardest hit of the unemployed are young people with staggering college loans and no children.
You wrote:
For the same reason that I mention anti-taxes together with the GOP. The GOP — nationally and locally — has made global warming denial a centerpiece of its platform. If you don’t want to painted with that brush, then either (a) change your party affiliation or (b) change your party’s stance on global warming.
I knew I wrote too much and opened the door to a rat hole side issue when this post is about facts.
You really make me want to come up with rude remarks, kinda like when my ex-wife used to get right up into my face and call me disgusting names and say rude things about my dead parents hoping I would haul off and hit her and then it would be game over.
How about this: Flaherty-Finneran-DiMasi? I only bring this up because the MA House seems to be ethically impaired. Now probably DeLeo. Seems like the MA Democratic Party has made political corruption a centerpiece of their platform in this state. If you don’t want to be painted with that brush, either change your party affiliation or stop electing people with criminal tendencies or people who are willing to have criminals as their leaders.
From now on I am going to copy this statement into the bottom of every time I respond to one of your posts.
or maybe this one:
“Long live the McGrath & O’Brien Highway the best road in Massachusetts!”
The entire development of Western Civilization, dating to ancient times, stems from the ability to learn things about the universe in which we exist that are true. That is what allowed us to have something other than a primitive existence.
That doesn’t mean that everything is knowable. But it does mean that some things are known. We know, for example, that hurricanes result from high barometric pressure in the tropics, and not from gay marriage. We know, because we can read simple things written in English, that the name of the villian in this summer’s Batman movie is derived from fiction written 20 years ago, and not as an allegory to the company that Mitt Romney had absolutely nothing to do with from 1999-2002.
The slogan atop this page was chosen specifically to counter the world of today’s self described “conservatives” who claim that such things are inherently unknowable, yet are quite convinced that Obama is a Gay Communist Muslim Terrorist Dictator.
So, um, mind of God. Bullshit. God gave you a mind: use it.
But that’s makes me think of a few question you might have the answer to:
Are any of these things real?
Accupuncture
Feng shui
Karma
Internet addiction
I would also note that according to Bill Maher you are an idiot who believes in fairy tales by even mentioning God. Clearly he has a different view of facts.
I wish I was so sure about everything as many of the posters here.
Bill Maher is as ignorant as Pat Robertson. He just thinks that because some things are known, everything can be known, and he, of course, knows everything and is willing to discourse on it at length.
But that is no excuse to pretend that things that are manifestly true are false, because some charlatan on the internet or radio said so, which is what the “mind of God” post asserted, as if this were the Dark Ages.
Are they ‘real’? Yes there are things in reality called Accupuncture, Feng shui…
Do they have real effects? I don’t know about internet addiction, and I’m unaware of any effort to study and quantify (or even objectively define) Karma. But Accupuncture and Feng shui should have real world effects when employed and as such, can be measured and quantified (same with internet addcition actually). I believe in the process of discovering things and knowing things. All things known are provisional until better evidence is revealed, but that doesn’t mean we should go about our lives as if we shouldn’t assert that we know anything.
As for Bill Maher, I’ll disagree with CMDs assertion of his position (” because some things are known, everything can be known”) and just assert that the god question is one where the default position should be non-belief in the absence of compelling evidence (to be distinct from belief in god’s non-existence). I’ll find see if I can find some Dillahunty videos for you on the nature of scientific knowledge and the burden of proof.
Reality based means evidence based. Evidence exists and can be evaluated with respect to claims. This is the foundation of that allowed your car to be built, electricity to be discovered, and for your computer to function.
If you can find what you are looking for, that is compelling evidence of God’s existence. You just need to be willing to believe that something being as you expected it to be is proof of God. If you take everything for granted and say “give me more proof, I’m not convinced” then of course you’ll never be convinced.
It follows one should be 0% convinced.
Anything else is, well, fooling yourself.
The chair I am sitting on is proof, everything that is as I expect it to be is proof. Every second that goes by into the future as a continuation of the past, every conscious thought by every consciousness such as: “I am still sitting on this same chair, just as I expect” is evidence of God. If there weren’t God, then there would be no continuation of past into the future, the present would be totally random and formless and consciousness would be conscious of nothing. You can say that “no, consciousness of lasting physical existence is not proof of God” but it’s all the proof there is and it is enough proof if you are willing to believe that it is.
That’s got to be one of the lamest, nonsensical defenses of faith ever sputtered.
It’s not so very different from an argument Descartes provides in his Meditations or from Bishop Berkley’s resolution of the tree-in-the-forest problem
What’s dumb about it is that those arguments have been refuted for a very long time.
Yes, It’s like Berkley’s Immaterialism. I don’t think it’s been refuted, it is consistent with quantum physics and John Archibald Wheeler’s It From Bit. It can’t be refuted, there is no way to prove that existence and consciousness isn’t all created by God, or that it isn’t, at least not to anyone’s satisfaction.
If it can’t be proved or disproved, it doesn’t matter. Really. Because it has no discernible consequences.
The only reason people care at all about the existence of God — as opposed to the existence of any number of other possible entities whose existence and non-existence defy proof — is because they want a very particular sort of God to exist. That puts everything rather out on a limb.
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We only regard consciousness as special because we don’t understand it so well. Before we understood disease, we used to think deities sent them to us. Once we understand consciousness, God’s job description will get a bit smaller.
If we ever understand consciousness, it only would be an explanation that fits with what we have already come to expect and understand, or whatever God comes up with. Creation is a seamless garment, everything can be explained by digging deeper into it and saying that atoms have protons and protons have quarks, but those things weren’t there before. God doesn’t mind the added work, God wants increasing fullness. So any understanding of consciousness isn’t going to get past the fact that it is still our consciousnesses that are now conscious of this new understanding. But if it is materialistic, it isn’t a full understanding. Of course it matters if one believes in God or Materialism, it changes how one behaves and thinks.
And I think it does matter whether to believe or not believe in God, there are discernable consequences. It can’t be denied that most people do, so willfully being opposed to the majority and to human history and culture is like pouring a little sugar into society’s gas tank – it makes the engine cease up and destroys the car.
Rather presumptuous, no?
God’s will is always what happens, God is never thwarted by someone doing something against God’s will. So I just mean, don’t worry about God getting bogged down by us learning too much. Some people think, uh oh, if God is keeping track of every single thing that we are conscious of and expect and believe in, then what happens when we reach God’s memory capacity and He can’t keep track of every scratch on every CD in everyone’s CD collection anymore? But that would not be what we’d expect, that would be a seam in the garment, so that means God has an infinite storage capacity and the Divine Being is as full of detail as the created world appears to contain, and constantly expanding.
That is from the Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards by Sang Hyun Lee. I wish I could cut and paste more from the Google preview for this book, but I have to type it myself, so I will just link to it and direct you to the Introduction. I love this book, I have a signed copy!
How the heck do you know that God has a “will”?
You don’t. Really. You. Just. Don’t.
It’s like insects imagining God has antennae or elephants imagining God has a trunk.
is a presumption.
I don’t understand your objection, is it that God has no will, or that there is no God, or what? Let’s start with something we agree on, how about “water will run down hill?” Is that presumptuous? Faith is nothing if not presumption, it’s presuming that what we believe is true. So telling someone who acts on faith that they are acting on faith is rather late to the party.
You doubt that?
Our human notion of will concerns our motivation and commitment to get something done that we might not be able to get done. For example, no one speaks of willing to blink his or her eyes, or willing to food to be digested in the stomach.
We exert our will. God, being omnipotent and all (by definition!), doesn’t need to “exert” to get anything done and there is never any question that an omnipotent being will do what it sets out to do. It just does stuff. It doesn’t say, “I’m going to try extra hard this time because I might not succeed.” It’s freaking omnipotent. There’s no worry and no will.
So the notion of “will” as applied to God is simply absurd, and by definition. Again, it’s like elephants imagining God has a trunk.
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If by will, you mean intention you are again being extremely presumptuous.
An omniscient being knows a whole lot more than you do. You are going to discern the intents of something infinitely knowledgeable?
I don’t think so.
I discern God’s will is to make water run downhill. I don’t know God’s will about things in the future, except I can predict with some chance of being wrong. The more sure I am, like about water run downhill, it’s thanks to God giving me faith and holding it all together comprehensibly and beautifully. As I said above “God’s will is always what happens, God is never thwarted by someone doing something against God’s will.” You’re right, God is omnipotent and unworried, but certainly has a will, which is to self-enlarge according to what God already is.
Why don’t you just discern that water runs downhill? You can see the hill. You can see the water. Why make it complicated?
And right, of course, God has a will. He has a trunk and antennae too, and he goes ribbit at night.
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However, if it’s just faith, you can believe anything and you have placed yourself safely out of the reach of reason.
There is no difference between the world created by God and the world that we see, except that we don’t kick God out of the world, we attribute everything to God. It is NOT simpler to kick God out, because then it contradicts human culture and history and the beliefs of 95% of us. It is more complicated to try to deny that God is creating the world.
And please no more links to erotic frog porn, I’m at work.
This is why people need to read Edwards more: we can’t “believe anything” because everything we believe is dictated by things we can’t change. I can’t change my own will or beliefs, my will and beliefs are changed by reasons that I may or may not understand. Reason is at the highest plane in Edwards Calvin and Locke and all the Enlightenment Protestants.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWsH6GO6PIA&feature=related
There’s a bunch of evidence, actually, that we are predisposed to believe in god or gods, that people with faith tend to be happier than those without, and that religion is remarkably ubiquitous among our species.
Wanting to believe something a whole, whole lot is nearly the opposite of having evidence for it.
… psychological predisposition. It’s usually expressed as a tendency to see agency more than is warranted. I think it was Shermer’s book that dealt with this most recently. The happiness issue just came up recently in a Mooney article on Alternet with regard to left/right. I’m not sure how much I buy it. I suspect that the psychological framework that leans more authoritarian might tend to lean toward a bias in reporting self happiness. After all, if you’re not happy, the system must not be working and in authoritarian thinking you’re not likely to question the system.
I’ve always observed that people with my politics displayed on their bumpers tend to be the most dangerous drivers. So I might even believe liberals tend to be more neurotic.
I just finished Kahneman’s wonderful book Thinking Fast and Slow. His research interest has shifted a lot toward measuring happiness and it turns out that our experience of happiness differs a lot from our memory of it. We can thoroughly enjoy the Mahler Third but if there is some disturbance that interrupts our enjoyment in the final bars, we will remember the disturbance and the rest of the experience won’t register. “Did you enjoy the symphony?” “No,” we will answer despite enjoying 98% of it.
For that reason, measures of happiness based on questions like “Are you happy?” turn out to be notoriously unreliable. They’re even heavily biased by what you were just doing, thinking, or reading. So perhaps such happiness results have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Martin Seligman, in Authentic Happiness, a book which otherwise espouses the remarkable benefits of being an optimist, points out that on a number of measures mildly pessimistic folk tend to access things more accurately. Maybe getting things right is by nature accompanied with a bit of dourness.
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Following up on Haidt’s distinction between liberal and conservative moral views, one sees that conservatives place a much higher value on maintaining the social order. I bet there’s something sort of nice and reassuring about maintaining the social order as opposed to scouting out trouble all the time.
I wish I had specific cites, but I remember a couple of experiments I heard about. I hope I’m remembering them correctly.
One was a study of perceived vs. actual locus of control. For any given thing in your life it can be said that you have some amount of control and/or some amount of control exerted by others or chance. Sometimes the particulars are actually knowable. There can be a discrepancy between the amount of control you think you have over a given thing vs. the amount you actually have. The experiment held the hypothesis that depressed people have an overly pessimistic perception of their own control. What they found out was that the control group was overly optimistic and that depressed people were more accurate in their assessments. Maybe there’s a ‘reality based community’ relationship with this phenomenon and what’s in Mooney’s article regarding happiness.
The other experiment involved manic depression in groups of chimps. What they noticed was that within a group of chimps, some small number (usually one) would exhibit manic depression, but which chimp it was would differ from time to time. They wondered if they removed the chimp from the group if it would inhibit the ‘spread’ of the behavior. So they’d monitor the chimps (these were in the wild) and surreptitiously remove the chimp in question and then observe the results. When others continued to exhibit manic depression, they removed them as well. Then one day they found the group all dead or run away. The theory is that the depressed chimps actually served an important function – by being away from the central group and being someone agitated and jumpy/sensitive, they were great at warning the group about predators. Its a leap, but its worth considering the role in human society of the depressed artistic types as being more ‘in touch’ with the trends and dangers around us from a societal level.
Just some useless trivia from a useless trivia machine.
I’m looking forward to reading it. Just finished A Drunkard’s Walk. Now reading Albion’s Seed.
is one of the best and most influential things I’ve read in a while.
We can make whole lists of things that could go either way.
I bring up Feng Shui because in China it’s a fact. I bet they also think numerology is a fact as well.
Maher is constantly brought up as a source not as much as Colbert or Stewart though. Good to see you’re not a fan.
… opinion until the study is done with proper controls. There is an answer and because real world effects are alleged, they are knowable. As such, there is a ‘fact’ but until they evidence shows it works, believing it works is unwarranted.
nothing is true or false, but “true” and “false” are good enough approximations.
… not the same as holding a position that accepted truth shouldn’t be trusted. The evidence is the prism through which we understand truth, and our ability to understand (and revise our understanding as warranted) is what the value is. Truth or falsehood is just the observed object.
Actually, no.
Having made a number of misstatements like this due to being in a hurry to post, I now try to remember to check my facts before making an assertion like that.
I think CMD’s point was that hurricanes are not caused by gay marriage, no matter what various right-wingers may assert.
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if the intent of your initial post was to point out the fact that both Obama and Romney are capable of mispeaking then you didn’t convey that. And now that some folks are challenging the motivation behind your post, you trot out this dodge, claiming only to illustrate that Romney’s inability to express a thought has received too much criticism. Your purpose was to mischaracterize the president’s speech in order to push your own ideology.
I don’t care who it is on this board that appears to be in your corner,I said it before and I;ll say it again—you are a liar and you continue to prove it.
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Couldn’t you even keep your word for a single day, maybe 12 hours?
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A M. Python reference-Just in case.
Mr Eno is good enough frequently put up a post titled “Five Thing you should know today”. Example: http://www.redmassgroup.com/diary/15139/five-things-you-should-know-today-july-19-2012. Responding might not be such a bad thing. For example, are we following the Mass Gaming Commission story or the casino in Taunton?
…I go by Simple J. Malarkey…I feel the need to add my two cents.
I think it is fair to say that there are “good” trolls and “bad” trolls and like pornography, you know it when you see it. Frankly neither idealogical side can claim the moral high ground on this one. Each side has zealots who just bunch trolls that want to keep the other side honest with the bat sh*t crazies that quickly drag things into the toilet.
RMG, like BMG, frequently bans people. Like most of us, by the weight of the shear volume of diaries and comments made, I’ve been rude and discourteous many times. Of course mostly as reactions to similar behavior (but as someone with a big target on me at RMG–I have over reacted a couple of times to a critical comment, when the other person intent was only to be critical.
I absolutely get a kick out of people who just dismiss me because I’m a “troll” or that I don’t use my name (hell–there are some true crazies on the net and I don’t want some of them to figure out where I live). Often i feel they don’t like what I write and they don’t have a good come back, so they just attack me. (Of course with the law of averages, sometimes I bomb and get the living sh*t verbally kicked out of me…it comes with the territory).
Why haven’t I been banned from Redmassgroup when so may others have? Anyone who lurks over there knows it’s NOT because I avoid criticizing the behavior of right-wing smear artist Rob Eno (who usually follows the adage of “don’t feed the trolls” when it comes to me…usually). But as Rob himself as stated–when banning another liberal troll who had a sock-puppet account on the side–occasionally I add some positive dialog and I try to provide critique that goes beyond the usual left/right talking points. (Hopefully an example of this, is my post today opposing this week’s so-called “anti-crime” bill, not because it puts people in jail longer, but because it will endanger public safety)
Which brings me to JohnD and others like Merrimackguy. I certainly see them as good trolls on BMG. Folks that have no patience for them or dismiss them out-of-hand are no better than those folks at RMG that do the same to me…and I’m sure JohnD and others like him find it amusing and uplifting when they get these reactions. At the same time, JohnD and all can engage in serious, worthy ways and create value for this site (eek, does that mean I create value for RMG’s site? I’d ask for a cut of the ad revenue, but then they would know where I live).
In closing, when people talk politics–and talking politics (and by extension policy) is what BMG/RMG are all about–disagreements are bound to happen and sometimes the disagreements get personal and passionate. No way to avoid that. One reason I like to post and comment on RMG is that the disagreements are of the big “world view” level…the role of government; the value of economic regulations vs unfettered markets, etc. Back in the day when I huge out at BMG, the disagreements were over minutia. We shared the same world views and disagreements (which could be very passionate) were often over details and process. Nope. that is not for me. If I’m going to get all wound up in a blog–it better be about big ideas and not policy disagreements.
There are some people over at RMG that have actually said they enjoy SOME of my contributions. The same can be said about JohnD and other “good” trolls. Let’s not let idealogical purity or a few JohnD misfires (I’ve had plenty) give people an excuse to dismiss his and other opposing opinions .
Well stated.
I don’t think either should be banned, I don’t think either intentionally troll with the intent of harming the site. I passionately disagree with each, but by and large I think our spats fall within the envelope of “political debate”.
If BMG “frequently bans people”, the editors do so in a way that is largely transparent to the community — I can only think of one or two participants who’ve been banned since I’ve been here (several years ago) and those were well-justified. I can’t speak for RMG because I virtually NEVER go there.