Shit, you've caught me in a trap where I've contradicted myself. Only... like.... SlappyMcGee is not myself. In fact, last I checked, he was a second dude altogether. And while you may think it makes me a hypocrite to say one thing and then, later on, say something completely different as SlappyMcGee, I fully retain my perspective on the issue. We disagreed here.Tsukatu wrote:"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.
Atilla said something that was entirely anecdotal. Slappy challenged it. I went along with it. SlappyMcGee and I are two differing persons.
When you make shit up, it doesn't matter whether it's a statistic that you made up, a story that you made up, or whatever. You made that shit up. The phrasing of your lie doesn't make it any more true. If Tsukatu is keen on believing lies when they're phrased in a way that sounds authoritative, I find that sad. That's also not the Tsukatu that I know.Suki wrote: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.blue_tetris wrote:Statistics without their sources are tantamount to anecdotes. They're stories you're using, conversationally, to add to a situation.
A lie is a lie, whether you call it a statistic or not. If you don't source your information, candy-coating it with numbers doesn't make it true. Saying that a news anchor told you that it's true doesn't make it true. Telling people you "saw it on Nova" doesn't make it true. Truth is not contained within the wording of the lie.Suki wrote: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.
A: It's a fact that women are retards.
B: Not only that, but 90% of women are retards. I saw it in this documentary once. I don't remember the documentary, but it was extremely reliable and had lots of statistical sources and shit. Trust me.
C: That's bullshit. I know plenty of women and they're not retards. I don't have proof either, but I'm just adding that, in my experiences, at least 50% of women aren't retards. No hyper-liberal documentarians have made any films about the shit that I just made up, but it's significantly more reasonable.
D: Fuck you, Person C. You're out of line. I agree with Person B, plus he said the words "documentary" and "statistics", so his story is true.
Person D here is Tsukatu. Tsukatu is not the same person as SlappyMcGee.
If I pretended that I got my information about human behavior from a documentary or told you I learned it to get a Communications minor, would that render it more true? Which lie did I have to use to vindicate that what I was saying was true? Clearly I either need to use Atilla's lies, or make up shit you already agree with, so you forgo fact-checking me in a chiefly FOX News network fashion.Suki wrote:First, this is your personal experience, and therefore useless in determining whether or not this is how conversations end up working.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.
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.
I continue not knowing why you think this is a lie. Your inability to Google "Tsukatu" and discover this yourself is overwhelming. There is a vast wealth of information available on how Tsukatu is a ridiculously lofty-minded atheist who views himself as a perpetual underdog of the system. I'd pull up the first few Google links and put them in giant quote blocks in this post, but the irony would take up far too much space.Suki wrote:In other words, you're proud that you're telling blatant, unashamed lies? Respect minus another fifty. Holy shit, dude.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.
The fact is, if you believe that content is widely supported, you don't have any concern for its lack of sources. You accept information previously-regarded as true as being necessarily true. So when Atilla said "It was a show about atheists having to live in a gated community", you accepted that this was widely established fact. Like everyone knows that atheists have to live in island communities. I don't see that as fact. That's what Atilla said. Atilla did not say that "atheists are the most disparaged group" and leave it at that. He referenced (what I thought) was a ridiculous situation that is occuring in the United States, whereby atheists are systemically corralled. So I called him on that.Suki wrote: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.
Had Atilla only said that atheists were more disparaged than other religious groups, I'd have taken no issue. But he provided a bizarre scenario occuring in the United States and gave no source for this ridiculous notion.
My argument was never about "Atheists aren't disparaged". My argument was that violence against atheists was not widespread. So when Tsukatu jesused himself in to put up a whole bunch of statistics largely unrelated to the specific nature of Atilla's claims, it was information that was both true, but not really beneficial to either side of the previous discussion. You spent no time verifying that Atilla's scenario involving atheist concentration camps in an unknown Aussie docudrama was even remotely true.
You changed the argument at hand into one in which you were correct.
Atilla: I am presenting sourceless info. I am an Australian. I have an experience where I watched a film that says that violence (a key word in the original discussion) against atheists is widespread in the US.
Dave: I am presenting equally sourceless info. I am an American. I have a broad number of experience where I am living as an atheist in the US, surrounded by other atheists, and have seen no violence (again, the key word; no one mentioned whether or not people "agreed with our lifestyle") against them as a result of their atheism.
Tsukatu: That's bullshit, Dave. Unlike Atilla's, your information is sourceless and I don't immediately believe it as true. Despite the evident cuteness of his unevolved form, most trainers still elected to evolve to Raichu. Check Google next time. Respect -50, :/.
So, even if you were entering into our sourceless conversation about the violence against atheists, you didn't even appropriately provide content related to that. You spammed a set of largely unrelated polls that revealed that most Americans don't understand the lifestyle of atheists. Then you changed my opinion to being that I think atheists are universally respected, so you could be corrected, and then we mostly started talking about fact-checking.
Where Atilla's sourceless citations of widespread violence against atheists was vacuously true, becuase you figured it was common knowledge that athies get beaten up for their shoes.
So when you go into this spiel:
It makes little sense to me. You've changed the argument, and are largely guilty of using the same hyperbole I used. The same hyperbole where I said "You know, atheists aren't hanging from street lamps in the darkened, rain-soaked cities of the Western world." to make your argument seem insane. You've changed my argument to "Atheists are the most loved and respected of social groups in the US." Mostly, because your retrograde amnesia prevented you from discerning that the original argument was about violence against atheists and their internment into camps and their systematic slaughter. Now I don't know where I'm coming from.Suki wrote: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.
But the hyperbole I'm using for irony's sake is, I believe, naturally and unironically ingrained into how Tsukatu does argumentation. Like, you honestly believe I've taken the side of "Atheists are revered as new-age gods by the American public." so that you can properly debate it.
And I never disagreed with any figures. You really do believe that I was contesting those polls you Googled up, and not Atilla's documentary where it could be conjectured that American atheists were forced into gated communities and had violence perpetrated against them regularly.Suki wrote: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,
Before you had even entered the argument (in your own words, bro), there were no statistics out on the table. There was just Atilla's impression of the violence against American atheists and mine. Your figures resolved nothing. They were to put you on your hoity-toity dais composed of factoids, whereby you could gaze down at the masses and turn water into wine.Suki wrote: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.
You have mentioned in the past that you're a different guy in real life. From Ventrilo to discussions on the forums, it's certainly come up. And it always puts dudes in a weird place. Like, we don't know who to talk about anymore. All the shit you gave us as information about you, as a person, is something we're not allowed to talk about anymore. And you shroud yourself in this mysterious "We don't know who you really are" bit. How do you intend we think about Tsukatu if all the information you've provided is something we're not entitled to use when coming up with how you interact with humans, generally.Suki wrote:"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.
I always act in the same way that I interact with real world humans. That way, when humans start discerning my true nature, I won't have to say "That's not really me. I'm a different guy in the Otherworld. Don't base any predictions you've made about me socially on the ways I behave." O_O
That makes you depersonalized at the very least and schizophrenic at the most. If this is common Internet form and I'm overemphasizing things, then I strongly believe that all of today's youth are goddamn crazy and the Internet is ruining them.
You bring to the Internet a discussion about the world away from the forums. That world is still one that's largely manufactured for the Net. The Internet modus contains a collection of information about a Tsukatu that goes to supermarkets. And even though there aren't any supermarkets* on the Internet, the information you've provided about your general supermarket behavior is something we're gonna talk about. On the Internet.Suki wrote: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.
I think we're all entitled to using examples about the real world for behaviors we see. We can't constantly use examples from the Internet world. I don't know shit enough about the depths of the Internet world to view behaviors in a purely Internet fashion. And, like, if you're to the point in your life where your Internet behaviors cannot possibly be identified or extrapolated by humans in the real world who base their opinions on real world interactions, it's time to unplug your 4chans and log off of your CPUs.Suki wrote: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."