Atomicflea wrote:
In your 'debates' with them, you
a. state a position that is unfounded, based entirely on a hunch or opinion,
Sometimes, I'm stating an opinion. You know. Like when the very first line in my first post in a thread starts with "I think that ...".
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b. get called on it and asked to support your statement with a credible source,
Getting "called on it" usually consists of several posters simply laughing or attacking me for having an opinion that doesn't agree with theirs. And when pressed, can't come up with any reasonable argument against what I've stated except to insist that I'm wrong and they're right over and over.
What credible source? I was stating an opinion. It's not like I can prove that Obama joined a black liberation church because he wanted to gain some "street cred" in the area in order to help his political career. That's why it's an opinion. It happens to fit the facts pretty nicely though, doesn't it?
Um... But when I am stating facts, I most definitely back them up with credible sources. I have an entire list of web sites linked that I use purely as sources when debating on this site. The reason I have them bookmarked? Because due to the thick heads of most of the people I debate with, I end up having to prove the exact same 20 or so facts over and over.
But I'm the one who doesn't use credible sources? You're kidding right?
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then,
c. switch the focus of the argument to claim you're not being understood and never address the original fallacy.
Ah. Like when I say that Obama joined this church for the aforementioned reasons, and then later have to clarify (repeatedly) that I was only talking about a black democrat?
That sort of "switching the focus"? ;)
I would think that the guy who takes my statement and then tries to argue that since white democrats don't have to attend Trinity church to establish their bona-fides that this somehow proves my argument to be false is the guy who's switching the focus, don't you think?
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This is something you have done not for months, but for years,
Yes. And if those people arguing with me would stop using a continuous stream of strawman and red-herring counters, maybe this wouldn't happen. Seriously. Go back and read this thread. Somehow Joph managed to take my original statement and transform it into me arguing that all Democrat politicians at any level of government had to attend this one particular church.
How he got that from this statement is beyond me:
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Nah. I think that his approach has been to appear to the African-American community to be "one of them", while appearing to everyone else as though he isn't. By joining said church in the first place, it established his bona-fides with the black liberation movement and gave him the position and support he needed to move his career forward in the first place.
How did we end up spending about a page over whether I was changing my story by insisting that this didn't apply to white democrats? Think about it... Really hard. All I did was attempt repeatedly to restrict the discussion to the actual point I was making. Meanwhile Joph, Smash, and others kept attempting to spin it into something else and argue against whether white Democrats had to do this. Whether I was arguing that all black Democrats had to attend this same church. None of which had a damn thing to do with the original point I was making.
Why do you think that keeps happening? It's not me doing the spinning here...
