blue_tetris wrote:I frankly do not, nor have I ever, seen the problem in adding to a debate one's own personal experiences on an issue. It's weird to rail against the offering of an anecdote (not anecdotal evidence) in a thread whose content I, to that point, had viewed as conversational.
"We were all just inputting anecdotal evidence from our own sourceless experiences." -blue_tetris
"I'm questioning the accuracy of Atilla's claims based on personal experience." -SlappyMcGee
And you've made me realize that I neglected to add "retroactively changing previous statements" to the list of things that need to stop.
blue_tetris wrote:[In the context of casual conversation,] Statistics without their sources are tantamount to anecdotes. They're stories you're using, conversationally, to add to a situation.
When the subject is on the scale of an entire culture (or amalgamation of 50 cultures, if we want to more accurately describe the US), statistics trump personal experience because the latter has zero weight
regardless of whether or not it's true. At the very least, statistics have a chance of meaningfully contribute to a conversation about society (which this conversation was about), whereas personal experience
cannot matter except as flavor.
Furthermore, in the quote before this one you said you weren't giving anecdotal evidence, yet in this quote you argue that your anecdotal evidence was on par with Atilla's statement.
I also take issue with how you describe a casual conversation. A casual conversation does not boil down everything that would otherwise be evidence to unsupported claims, nor does the amount of support a claim might have -- whether in a casual conversation or not -- determine whether it's equivalently relevant to some other claim (in this case, you're calling the casual conversation a trivial case where no claim is supported and therefore all are equally meaningful). No, what a casual conversation does is remove from you the burden
to substantiate your claims. For example:
A: "So whales sing, apparently."
B: "Actually, I don't remember where I read it, but there was this thing that said that more than something like 80% of whales sing as they travel."
C: "What? Nah, that's bullshit. I've been snorkeling once near some whales and didn't hear shit."
Even in the context of a casual conversation, Person C is being unreasonable, and it doesn't actually matter of any of those statements are true. His input should be immediately discarded, because the subject was not "have you ever heard a whale sing," and was therefore his limited personal experience was not capable of being used to contest B's statement.
Had you led with, "that's weird; I've never been persecuted for being an atheist," then fine, I'd never have said a thing. But now this has turned into some parallel universe where you and Slaps have thrown out everything you once knew about how talking works.
blue_tetris wrote:When dudes are sitting around on a couch talking through their collective experience and maintaining a small debate, then some guy says that he heard something about this, then conjures a statistic, it is universally dismissed as unreliable.
First, this is your personal experience, and therefore useless in determining whether or not this is how conversations end up working.
And to illustrate my point on how personal experience is unreliable at this scope because it can vary so easily, the situation you've described has never been my personal experience. I've always seen that quoted statistics are trusted above random personal experience in casual conversation, and the people offering anecdotes add some disclaimer like, "that's strange, because I...", without attempting to invalidate the statistical claim with their anecdote.
blue_tetris wrote:You contend you are not an asshole (something that I don't fully understand).
This is a tangent, but I didn't say I wasn't an asshole. All I did was point out that I was accused of being one, not that it was wrong of anyone to do that.
The relevant caveat there was that I didn't discuss my thoughts on religion with people in person whom I couldn't trust to handle well what I had to say. I can be a wary asshole. It is possible. I've been consistent in describing myself this way.
blue_tetris wrote:Suki wrote:Slappy: "I'm questioning the accuracy of Atilla's claims based on personal experience." That blew me right out of the fucking water. At least "a skepticism based on his lack of sources" was remedied by my 2-minute "dredging" job, where I spelunked into the masterfully hidden depths of Google's first search result.
Dunno why that blew you out of the water. Slappy questioned the accuracy of Atilla's claims. Atilla claimed that atheists were corraled into gated community and unable to get jobs, forced to the back of the bus, and made to wear badges that read "Der Gottless". Maybe he thought those claims were inaccurate and that reality does not have Athies so subordinated. The claims that Atilla made were "based on personal experience". So Slappy is, altogether, finding a set of claims inaccurate, which were also based on the anecdotal evidence of Atilla.
Not only was Atilla not saying any of those things, but pointing out that, technically, hearsay of compiled statistics counts as anecdotal evidence is such a trivial and empty point that I'm not going to dignify it with a response. What I'm more concerned is that you're resorting more and more to what any observant person would call bitch moves. You've put words in Atilla mouth and in mine in the face of explicit statements to the opposite, tried to creatively and counter-intuitively reinterpret the history of the conversation, and grossly exaggerated the availability of support for the statistics Atilla gave. Knock it off. Seriously. It's like you can't help yourself but try to see how much compulsive lying you can get away with in a thread, and it's downright shameful. Do you not realize that we can plainly see you doing it?
blue_tetris wrote:I maintain you are the PETA of atheists and fully maintain my right and ability to use hyperbole. If you had a bucket of Jewblood, you would gleefully dump it over Christian heads at a religious procession. I will continue using this degree of ridiculous hyperbole, unless you and the Christians keeping this brother-man down want to take that away from a proud Atheist-American as well.
In other words, you're proud that you're telling blatant, unashamed lies? Respect minus another fifty. Holy shit, dude.
blue_tetris wrote:Suki wrote:I was. I've been in that mode ever since you brought up your personal experience (which, again, was your very first reply to Atilla).
Then it certainly seems odd to me that you'd be annoyed at
my proofless assertions and not Atilla's. They were posted in tandem. Maybe Atilla's reinforced your existing belief that atheists are the downtrodden heroes of logic and rationale, so Atilla's lack of reliable sources wasn't worth standing up against.
EY?
No, it's actually like I said in my previous post (seriously, it was, like, right there, in its own paragraph and everything, as its own standalone point): it was my understanding that this was common knowledge here, since I thought it was brought up recently and sufficiently supported. I didn't realize that some of us had suffered brain hemorrhages and selectively forgot that that was the state of US opinions on atheism today. I thought it was obvious.
Even so -- and this is a distinction I've made repeatedly now, so please,
please actually listen this time -- I took issue with your reasons for dismissing those figures, namely that your personal experience conflicted with them.
That was the reason you gave for disagreeing with the figure, and that's the reason that Slaps
explicitly gave through chokes and gasps around your e-peen in his esophagus. Your post is right fucking there. You disagreed because you thought your personal experience trumped several well-supported statistical facts that I thought were common knowledge, as did Slaps.
blue_tetris wrote:Suki wrote:Are you fucking kidding me? Do you stalk me or something? It doesn't at all make sense to you that from the moment my life was first threatened that I became uncomfortable talking face-to-face with people about what I think? It doesn't explain to you why I'm so much more vocal on a medium that is effectively anonymous, and more importantly, distant? If there's anything that immediately disqualifies your past and future input on a subject, it's some completely unfounded declaration of knowledge like this. This is the sort of shit that's surprising me in this thread, because it isn't like you, and it's this that I think you should own up to.
I don't know why you constantly bring up the difference between Internet Suki and real life Suki. It's entirely pointless in our Internet conversations. There
is no real Tsukatu. Tsukatu is an Internet handle, and it has an Internet persona linked to it. All the shit we say about you, we say about
Internet you. You don't need to constantly sweep in to defend
real "Suki" against a possibly negative Internet impression he's giving people. If you think you're making a certain impression of yourself on the Internet, expect that all the people in that same medium will respond to it accordingly.
This was the
first time it was brought up, and I challenge you to find any occurrence of me bringing up that notion in a debate thread within
years.
"You bring this up constantly." "You managed to dredge up these statistics." "You're the PETA of atheists." "Atilla said that atheists are murdered in the streets and nobody cares." These are all egregious exaggerations you've made, and some of them were restated even when directly pointed out for what they were. I asked you to stop doing this. Why are you still being a bitch? The Baby Jesus is crying, and it's all your fault.
Even-fucking-so, even if I brought up that distinction constantly, then I'm still completely justified in defending myself on this tangent Slaps started where we try to determine why Suki might possibly get antagonized. And it's even stranger to me when you acknowledge openly that what you know of me is purely from online interaction but still boldly claim that my offline circumstances (which you've also openly acknowledged that you invented) cause my offline problems because of the person I am offline. That's schizophrenic as hell.
blue_tetris wrote:Do you know how irritating it would be if you were watching Die Hard, and every time that Detective John McClane interacted with Hans Gruber, Alan Rickman stepped in to say "Okay, Detective McClane. I know that in this movie Hans Gruber is a bad guy. But I really need you to know that the real Hans Gruber is a different guy." Detective McClane would say "Fuck you, dude. We're in the movie right now. I don't give two shits about Alan Rickman". Then Detective McClane would fuck some bitches.
If someone had said this in a different thread, you'd have replied with some Dave-like embellishment of, "that's irrelevant because the fictional John McClane was not hunting the real-world Hans Gruber."
My offline behavior determines how I'm treated offline. How is this difficult to understand? If you're saying you only know the online version of me, then stop commenting on the offline version of me. If you knew this to begin with, you definitely wouldn't have gone down the ridiculous road of "your online personality determines how you're treated offline."
This has officially become depressing.
