Quo Vadis GOP?

[crazy canuck]

I bought a dishwasher last month.  It took two weeks to be delivered.

How did you get them through immigration?

[Razgovory]

That was up to the people at Lowe's.

[viper37]

I bought a dishwasher last month.  It took two weeks to be delivered.

Buying them new is not the problem.  Getting them repaired is the nightmare.

[viper37]

The lawyers of this board might be interested in this bit of trivia:
Draft Overturning Roe v. Wade Quotes Infamous Witch Trial Judge With Long-Discredited Ideas on Rape

Justice Alito's leaked opinion cites Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century jurist who conceived the notion that husbands can't be prosecuted for raping their wives, who sentenced women to death as "witches," and whose misogyny stood out even in his time.

[...]

Ah, Mary would love that too, but not for the same reasons.

[Admiral Yi]

I can totally believe that CC tries very hard to determine what is being communicated that is not expressly stated.  It's the expressly stated parts that he never bothers with.

About par for the course around these parts.

Bullshit.  The vast majority of people here communicate in good faith.

[Admiral Yi]

If you are terrified of that you need to toughen up.

The guy was just president for four years, had a majority in both houses for half of it, and the major thing he got through was a tax cut. He commanded the executive branch and tried to launch an insurrection to stay in office and only got a band of goofballs led by a guy in a viking helmet to respond. If he wasn't a threat then, he isn't a threat now that he is out of power and is getting more senile by the day. Notice the crowd sizes of his rallies keeps diminishing.

He got many members of the House and a number of Senators to vote to not certify the election.  He attempted to get the Georgia Secretary of State to invent enough votes to overturn the state election results.  He has persuaded 60% of the GOP, the party that will soon have a majority in both houses of Congress, that the last election was the result of cheating.  No one needs to toughen up.

[ulmont]

I can totally believe that CC tries very hard to determine what is being communicated that is not expressly stated.  It's the expressly stated parts that he never bothers with.

About par for the course around these parts.

Bullshit.  The vast majority of people here communicate in good faith.

This may be the most frightening thing you've ever written.  Assuming you wrote it in good faith, of course.   

[Jacob]

Bullshit.  The vast majority of people here communicate in good faith.

I'd rate the good faith communication to sit at roughly 75% with maybe 15% misunderstandings that could be genuine or bad faith, and 10% that's obviously fuckery.

[DGuller]

Bullshit.  The vast majority of people here communicate in good faith.

I'd rate the good faith communication to sit at roughly 75% with maybe 15% misunderstandings that could be genuine or bad faith, and 10% that's obviously fuckery.

I think the obvious fuckery percentage is zero or close to it.  What does happen a lot for a couple of people, and almost never for most, is confirmation bias.  When you're dead convinced that someone is saying something stupid, then you'll find their post to be full of stupid ideas.  If the actual post you're replying to does not oblige to confirm your bias, you'll change it around somewhere between your eyes and whatever place cognition takes place in for you, until it fits the stupidity that you expect.

[Berkut]

Bullshit.  The vast majority of people here communicate in good faith.

I'd rate the good faith communication to sit at roughly 75% with maybe 15% misunderstandings that could be genuine or bad faith, and 10% that's obviously fuckery.

I think the obvious fuckery percentage is zero or close to it.  What does happen a lot for a couple of people, and almost never for most, is confirmation bias.  When you're dead convinced that someone is saying something stupid, then you'll find their post to be full of stupid ideas.  If the actual post you're replying to does not oblige to confirm your bias, you'll change it around somewhere between your eyes and whatever place cognition takes place in for you, until it fits the stupidity that you expect.

I think there is a decent amount of not trying at all to understand what the person is saying, but rather trying to figure out how to strawmen what they are saying in a very conscious manner.

I don't know if I would call that outright fuckery, but it isn't good faith either.

[Jacob]

I think the obvious fuckery percentage is zero or close to it.  What does happen a lot for a couple of people, and almost never for most, is confirmation bias.  When you're dead convinced that someone is saying something stupid, then you'll find their post to be full of stupid ideas.  If the actual post you're replying to does not oblige to confirm your bias, you'll change it around somewhere between your eyes and whatever place cognition takes place in for you, until it fits the stupidity that you expect.

That is a good point and I agree with the premise. To refine the thesis a bit - I think that there's a two-way relationship between every set of posters (it's not always symmetrical), and some of those relationships have a much higher rate of this happening while others do not.

I know I've definitely been part of this (in both directions), and I regularly observe it with other pairs of posters as well.

But yeah, I think it's a very sound observation.

If anything depended on languish - i.e. if we were a team responsible for actually doing something - it'd be incumbent on us to debug these communication issues. But nothing is, so we just sort of muddle along.

[DGuller]

I think there is a decent amount of not trying at all to understand what the person is saying, but rather trying to figure out how to strawmen what they are saying in a very conscious manner.

I don't know if I would call that outright fuckery, but it isn't good faith either.

Maybe I have excessive faith in people, or I have insufficient faith in the ability of people to stay rational, but I think deliberate failure to understand is much more rare than you believe to be the case.  I think it's easy to get red mist during a debate, especially one that gets nasty, as emotions take over and critical thinking gets even more unnatural than it usually is. 

If you suffer from red mist, then what I think often happens is that you see a post by someone else, and you pay attention only to the parts that can most easily in your mind be interpreted as confirming your idea of where the other person gets it wrong.  Suffering from confirmation bias doesn't mean that you're not an asshole, and definitely your confirmation bias comes in part from your own belief that the other person is evil or an idiot (or at least insufficient skepticism of that possibility), but it doesn't make your catastrophic failure of reading comprehension a deliberate act.

[DGuller]

If anything depended on languish - i.e. if we were a team responsible for actually doing something - it'd be incumbent on us to debug these communication issues. But nothing is, so we just sort of muddle along.

I've been saying for a while that I think other posters should feel a duty to intervene, if they see someone getting an unfair treatment.  It's understandable for bystanders to really want to desire to remain bystanders, but without external validation or invalidation it's impossible to break the deadlock of mutual misunderstanding.

[Berkut]

I think there is a decent amount of not trying at all to understand what the person is saying, but rather trying to figure out how to strawmen what they are saying in a very conscious manner.

I don't know if I would call that outright fuckery, but it isn't good faith either.

Maybe I have excessive faith in people, or I have insufficient faith in the ability of people to stay rational, but I think deliberate failure to understand is much more rare than you believe to be the case.  

I think it is about as rare as I believe it to be the case. But I guess that is tautological. 

And I don't really think of it is a "deliberate failure to understand" as much as a deliberate decision to engage in a battle to win some points for your team, rather then trying to actually understand what the other person is saying, and responding to that. It's more a difference in intent then a difference in behavior.

Obviously calling out people in THIS context is counter-productive, but I will call out someone who I think does this the right way - Oex. I disagree with him constantly (although I suspect that if we sat down and inventoried all of our political views in a broad manner we are about 90% in agreement - we just tend to focus on the places where we disagree), but I think he almost always gives my posts a fair attempt to understand, and then craft his response in response to what he thinks I am trying to say, rather then what he would have liked me to say so he can tell me how wrong I am.

And it works - he does a great job of making me re-think where I am coming from.

[Jacob]

I've been saying for a while that I think other posters should feel a duty to intervene, if they see someone getting an unfair treatment.  It's understandable for bystanders to really want to desire to remain bystanders, but without external validation or invalidation it's impossible to break the deadlock of mutual misunderstanding.

There are a few obstacles there, but I think the biggest one is that an intervention will typically be perceived as taking sides and - especially when red mist as you put it is already in effect - just add fuel to the fire, with you right in the middle of the fire.