General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I Have a Pledge to Make. Who Will Join Me? [View all]MFrohike
(1,980 posts)How about everybody drop the passive-aggressiveness and the never-ending lists of what Obama has/hasn't done? If you have an argument to make in favor of him, make it the old fashioned way: write an actual argument and support it with facts. Cutting and pasting propagandistic links from campaign organizations is not the same thing at all. The same goes for those who want to make arguments against him.
Oh, I have a request. Could we maybe cut out all the stupid fucking poll results? Seriously, in a two-party system with such an obvious grab bag of nuts on the other side, no poll showing all this amazing support for the president is worth jack shit. Seriously, if I have a problem with Obama, and I've got plenty of them, am I going to consider voting for one of the idiots on the other side? Maybe if I had a complete brain removal and made sure to poke out my eyes so I couldn't see those idiots anymore. If you're seriously going to trumpet a poll showing how x amount of "liberal Democrats" support the president, I hope your poll transcends the two-party system and asks about Obama compared to either an ideal candidate or some real world possibility (however remote). Anything else is simple passive-aggressive appeal to authority (I hate using debate terms, but this is accurate) with no relevance to the topic at hand.
Oh, kill the word strawman. Seriously, I quit reading threads because that word is waaaaaaaaaaaaay overused. It was pretty bad when I started reading this site in 05, but it's gotten all kinds of ridiculous lately. Honestly, I haven't seen someone properly use that word in years. It's slung around like Limbaugh uses liberal and Beck uses progressive. It's meant to be a nuclear response that removes any vestige of credibility from the other person without having to actually do the work of disproving their argument. It's lazy and irresponsible. Thus, I'm asking for a moratorium on that word.