Ramshutu

Public trials are more about mob culture than determining the truth.

Magics example was difficult, as he didn’t leave any IP evidence. I managed to get one of his alt accounts voting priviledges removed on the grounds that he was obviously suspicious: then I later found that magic and the suspicious account had posted almost identical RFDs in a debate where Magics RfD was obviously the other RfD rewritten.

I also found some common language and textual ticks that were present in Magics accounts - but on no others. I won’t say what they are in case he decides to come back.

Gotta, that debate was epic in every sense of the word - from the start - to the arguments - to the debate itself - to the voting and the repercussions!

(The debate was Magic vs Death: “Humans depend on genetically modified organisms”.)

I don’t particularly feel that the person who currently has around 100 individual debates, and has repeatedly professed his mastery ofndebate to varying degrees doesn’t “have time to get the facts and correlate them with all of [their] logic in a concise enough manner for people to understand and vote on.”

If you made a series of personal attacks on me, I’d ask you to defend them in a different way. But if you’re not willing to stand by claims you make against other people in a meaningful way - you shouldnt be making them.

Firstly, if the two best debaters in the world went head to head - if one had the facts on his side, they would win. 

Great care is used when selecting debate topics in formal debates such that the facts and logic aren’t on any one side or the other.

So yeah: If you have the facts and logic on your side, and you’re a good debater it’s very hard to lose a debate unless, of course, the judge takes this into account.

Now, while I love the straw man: no I’m not saying everyone in the world has to join this website and debate claims: I’m saying that if you make malicious claims about someone, you should have to stand by those claims - and be willing stake your own reputation on the veracity of those claims if challenged. Here, the only way of doing that is to risk your ELO by engaging in a debate.

Just so you’re aware, the technical term for someone who make a series of accusations, and then hides in an arena where they can’t be held accountable for them: is called “a pussy”.

Now, you’ve repeatedly made these claims - I’ve channeled you 3 times: the first debate, one of your accusations: you wouldn’t defend. The second was up for nearly two days (it had 3 hours remaining - when I created the third), the third one you've refused to accept in PM (which was then deleted)- and now a fourth attempt.

At this point, I’m more than happy to accept your applogy that you cannot jusify any of the accusations that you’ve made.

If you have the facts on your side and logic on your side - if you’re a reasonable debater - you cannot lose a debate.

If you’re worried you will lose the debate, then you’re missing one of those things.

If you don’t have the balls  to prove your accusations in debate form - you really shouldn’t be making the claims.

Debate is about using facts together with arguments to prove a point.

If you’re not brave enough to debate a topic, you either do not have enough facts, or you don’t have a good enough argument.

If you don’t have a good enough argument, or good enough facts - you shouldn’t make accusations.

Given that I’ve now issued challenge number 3 for you to debate on the resolution that I am unfairly voting against you, and you appear to have chickened out on debating me on it twice - and likely will for a third time - I’ll just assume that as you’re all mouth and no trousers, you know that these little angry accusations are out of bitterness and stingy, salty internet tears.

I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have a sense of humour and isn’t capable of laughing at themselves.

Why on the radio and not RMs back?

Kinda hard right now - the only stuff that wouldn’t dox myself is the other side of the Atlantic.

I could always improv it. Give me a random Dart user, a location and a situation :P

In terms of scripts - yes, but not directly, and not for a long time, and not for a meaningful duration. I’ll state right now, that I’m not famous, you won’t have heard of me, I highly doubt you’ve seen or read anything I’ve done though it’s possibke - and it’s not my main profession. 

I would consider myself a fairly avid writer, and have some experience going through a similar writing process when I was much younger, and thought I’d share a bit of what would have helped me. I was always a novel writing type of guy - so my first advice would always be to write a novel.

I would highly recommend writing scripts, worst case you feel better. Even if you decide not to show it to anyone, I always found writing pretty cathartic. It’s useful as a project and it is possible, if you’re good, to make a living at it. I would definitely keep at it - but would only share you work with people you trust. Just make sure that if there’s anything you’d super proud of, print it - mail it to yourself and keep the unopened envelope, I’ve heard some horror stories.

I’ve written a few scripts - none for a few years, all comedy only ever in the UK - and this was about 10 years ago.

Don’t post them on dart or anywhere online. You open yourself up to a whole host of legal related issues, and it’s a pretty good chance it will never go anywhere - even if what you write is awesome.

If it’s a weird or esoteric comedy, you have to be an exceptionally good writer for it to go anywhere and more work than you can fathom unless you ligerally luck out with open submission.  If it’s a middle of the road fox comedy, or Nickelodeon canned laughter and it’s kinda funny - it may help you as part of a portfolio to get a job writing - but that’s still hard.

My knowledge is more novel related, but I’ve written a few scripts before - years back - they’re easier to write than novels, but much harder to sell to an agent or a production house - and you’re much more likely to be using them to get a job writing for another show. But I will tell you now, the process of writing, and laughing to yourself reading your own work is the only fun part about it - and as an exercise in time wasting - it’s totally worth doing.

All answers are helpful answers.

While opinions on what content is require is important, it is very easy to get bogged down into specifics and details like which information to present where. While that’s always good to get implementation ideas, the crucial information for what to place in the main page, and how to progress the site is how people are using the website as a whole.

So with that I mind it’s VERY important to understand what everyone is using this site for, and how.

I would like to ask people:

For example, 

I log in to the main page and immediately go to the debate list, or the forums. I’m looking for new debates entering the voting period, new challenge period debates that pique my interest, and then as an asside whether there are any new posts.

So for me, a good landing page would list new debates, or debates that have changed status, and new forum posts: together with easily links to the debate list, AND my notifications.

I have used other debate sites, and if I went to the home page of createdebate. I’d be turned off by the call outs and deliberately trolling. DDO - imo is a little unclear what it is from the homepage, meaning that you’d have to be really interested to start (I found ddo through searching for discussion forums).

The important aspect, is why you chose to create a profile here and stay, what intruiged you by this site in order to stay?

So I probably know the answer to this - but are people on other sites too? What’s the time

splot? 50/50? 90/10? Is it clustered (1 month here, 1 month there).

When you are browsing Dart, what makes you think “hmm, I should check the other site out now”?

With these questions - it’s going to be much easier to break down why people are here, what makes people stay, and where the areas of focus may need to be. This is a much more important focus as a first step than leaping right to what people think should be done - as it helps crystallize thoughts and approaches.

We're in the top page of results for “Debate Platform”, so it maybe worth including the word “website and online” hidden in other places to raise the rankings. 

Other than that, ask a bunch of questions on Quora about debate, then link back to here: that’s a good way of starting to improve your links. Obviously linking back here from edeb8 and ddo would help a bit. Most of its just going to be time. The majority of our dart views are via direct links - which means we do have to work on improving search hit - mobile should catapault you!

Actually, I was intentionally mocking you because this is mostly another one of your overly dramatic pseudo-meltdowns: and the idea that someone with the temperament, and propensity to both leap to unwarranted conclusions, and lash out (as you’ve done here), is frankly laughable.

As I intimated. Bsh is a grown up, he has a thick skin, he has given me no indication that any decision hasn’t been thought out, and measured: whereas most pitchfork threads all appear to give the impression that they are being driven by typical internet butthurt and rage.

Bsh has my respect and support here because, frankly, he deserves it. He’s authoritative and more mature than 97% of the people here - including me, and the only problem I have with him right now, is that he’s not online as m

I am also not in the habit of treating threads like this with any respect - they are contemptuous appeals to ego, and attempt ferment discord and drama. There is sometimes a time and a place from dealing with things in public when time is of the essence, but here - not so much.

 

Or....?

To be honest, I was talking at you more than I was talking to you.

Ego of Burj Khalifa - the abilities of Mia Khalifa

You couldn’t moderate a nuclear reactor if you shat graphite and pissed Boron.

Bsh1 has an incredibly thick skin, doesn’t bite or escalate when provoked, is open to discussing issues and problems - and has: and as far as I can tell the main issue is simply that he is not 100% available at all times to soothe the wounded ego of resident drama queens.

Let’s ignore for the moment that you pilloried Chuck Schumer for what he said originally, it wasn’t the first thing he said. It was the first, second, third - in fact it was probably the only thing he said for nearly 3 and a half years give or take. He even got suggestions and prototypes with specs, and requirements.

The reason it’s not being built is primarily because it’s untenable to do so, and now he’s gone from building a wall over the entire southern border, that will be easier and that Mexico will pay for - to building a marginally better fence than already exists in some locations.

You seem to not understand the problem. The problem is that people are able to cross the boarder into the US as the wall is not on the border. As a

result, these individuals can legally claim asylum, leading to the 13,000 individuals in custody. 

IE: the wall doesn’t solve that problem, as the individuals are detained from the other side.

Pray tell. On what grounds do you think that asking what are the background motivating and precipitating factors that has caused many individuals to risk their lives in order to break the law crossing into the US is irrelevant to “how do we stop so many individuals breaking the law”?

Of course it’s relevant - it’s literally the key to understanding the whole crisis and the best way of mitigating the entire problem you have been going on about for 6 pages.

But of course what do I know, I’ve only been replying with details, facts, analysis of the geopolitics and the key factors that are driving the factors, as well as detail of the impact of other policy factors have on the problem - whilst you and the rest of your brethren here ignore all these details to propagate a singular naive solution - Apparently this means I have no nuance!

And it has - One of the biggest factors - and a primary driver of the net negative migration of Mexicans, is NAFTA and the Mexican Economy. There is a reason why there doesn’t need to be a border wall between the US and Canada - because people generally don’t want to leave their home and risk the money they have left, if they don’t have some compelling reason to do so.

But really, thats the issue - if pay attention to the migrants, the driving factors and the strength of motivation - you start realizing, as I have explained with the details above,  that mitigating it with a barrier isn’t practical or economical.

And bingo. There we go. Let’s not get pedantic about a wall or a fence. Except of course when you want to win an argument. I’m glad you’ve agreed that the wall - as promised by Trump isn’t being built, and I’m glad you agree that what is being built is a fence - and does not appear to be substantially more impressive than the barrier already there.

Now, you seem to have exceptional difficultly actually wrapping your head around facts, because you’ve ignored it the last 3-4 times I’ve said this in my previous posts, and your now ignoring it again to make claims that are not factually true. Let’s spell it out, again, and hope that this time you actually pay some sort of acknowledgement to reality rather than simply pretending as if what you want to be true is actually true.

The “crisis”, is children and families arriving to claim asylum. They don’t appear to be tunneling under (pretty common and not

solved by a barrier), climbing over (not particularly difficult unless the barrier is much taller), or breaking through (which is likely doable in 5 minutes with a blow torch or angle grinder). In fact - they don’t appear to even be crossing the barrier....

what is happening, is that they are just wading over the rio grande - onto American soil - then finding CBP and legally claiming asylum - the CBP then let them through the gates in the fencing.

What will happen if Trump builds a wall, or a big beautiful fence; is that these individuals will walk through a completely different type of gate. Of course, you’ve ignored that point the last 4 or so times I’ve mentioned it, so I doubt you’ll address it this point.

Now, like the other times you’ve ignored the point to focus on your strawman - the focus on the barrier shows a profound lack of understanding of what’s actually happening at the border, who is crossing, why they are crossing, what are motivating factors - and instead are treating the barrier like a zombie barrier, ignoring consequences, issues, limitations, and nuance of the problems.

For example, on the one hand your “building the wall”, on the other hand your undermining the very reasons illegal immigration has been dropping from Mexico, with undermining the Mexican economy through nafta negotiations and tariffs. Your also ignoring the geopolitics of Central America, ignoring the ongoing destabilization both from the politics and the drugs that are being paid for by the US. This is not even going into the issues with corruption caused by western corporations, farming demands and markets of the Us that dictates the economics of farming - all of which serve to wholly destabilize the region.

The irrational focus on the symptoms, rather than the actual problems, is why a fence isn’t going to fix the problem in any meaningful sense, because of the confluence of other issues. Worse, the primary way to alleviate the problem is to work with and integrate policy with heavy Mexican involvement - a country who Trump has largely alienated with his rhetoric and trade policy.

And this is the issue: this profound lack of joined up thinking, and absurdly naive policy choices is either an unserious, or negligent attempt to fix the problem. Indeed, given the response, the whole policy is less about actual resolutions to actual problems and more about exploiting individual fears from racists, the economically isolated, and the generally gullible in order to win votes,

This is a formal debate site, rather than what you’re used to at CD, where debate is effectively who can call their opponent the most inventive name, and the most common argument is accusing someone of being another user.

You're - terrible, terrible debater. Your strategy is normally to launch into an opening round of loosely supported arguments, which either have substantial warrant issues, or that don’t even fully support your conclusion.

When you opponent creates a logical rebuttal and counter argument, you seem rarely able to create an actual rebuttal, or counter argument in the context of the resolution, mostly relying on simply stating facts and shouting at readers to accept them as supporting your position without going through the process of explaining why.

More often than not, when you are unable to provide any sort of meaningful argument, you then simply hurl abuse and names at the person your disagreeing with.

I don’t understand why you’re even here: you clearly are more interesting in calling people names than debating.

Yeah - I am an extremist by continually pointing out you are dishonestly dodging the question, misrepresenting the argument - and ignoring all inconvenient facts. Shame on me.

For what reason are you completely ignoring the detail of what I said, and continuing to regurgitate a misrepresentation that I have already answered?

There is a crisis at a location where there is already a barrier.

If your response is to argue who is claiming that there is a crisis, rather than trying to address the problem that it seems that barriers don’t appear to be preventing the very crisis you change argued you need a barrier to help prevent - then you have a big problem with general critical thinking.

For the rest - Please re read the third part of the first post you completely ignored. Your response is not only intellectually dishonest, it’s also dodging the inherent issue - it’s not the case that the wall simply isn’t fully solving the crisis - for the specific facts I have raised multiple files, and you have ignored each time - a wall can’t really address these specific issues in any meaningful way.

Yeah I thought so.

A.) You claim link that there is a crisis at the border.

B.) There is already a border fence where there is a crisis

C.) You claim that a proper wall will help, despite:

- Trump isn’t building a proper wall

- The problem is not the lack of a wall, as no one is crossing the wall.

D.) You, and Trump are irrationally focused on one part of the solution, without paying any attention to the complexity of the actual problem, the causes and responses involved - and are championing spending billions of dollars on a solution which is unlikely to have any substantial impact on the problem you’re trying to solve.

E.) When this is all pointed out, you and the conservative idiots here:

- Ignore all the actual facts

- Start talking about Chuck Schumer

- Mischaracterize everything said

- Pretend that the wall is being build and demand I show it isn’t.

- Claim that the wall wasn’t intended to solve all problems (despite this not being the actual point being discussed).

The issue is that you and many others here are just plainly detached from reality, and fail to be able to logically defend any of the nonsense you’vee raising. Your desire for your talking points to be true (they’re not), far outweighs your own ability to logically defend them.

Hence your response on this thread - where you give up even trying.

Yeah.... what you’re doing is called “being intellectually dishonest”. We both know it’s impossible to provide evidence to show there is no wall being built. I mean - what would that even look like? Video of the entire border showing no wall?

No: if you claim Trump is building a wall - show it. Show one of his tweets showing his big beautiful wall, show him standing in front of his big concrete structure bragging about it.

The notion that you now are not posting a link to show that Trumps big beautiful wall is being built, after you’ve spent the last 5 pages posting link after link that support your position - should be evidence enough that we both know there is no actual wall.

That you’re hurling link after link - except for this one particular claim, and instead demand that I prove that your president isn’t carrying out his main campaign promise - should tell EVERYONE that you are keenly and specifically aware of how wrong you are.

This is called deflection. When you are aware how bad your position is, and how vacuous your claims are, you start trying to paint others as bad to make your side look better. 

Even then, like sooo many other aspects of your position, it is based on equal parts oversimplification, misrepresentation and general mischaracterization.

I get that you’re disinterested in reality, as it is well known that reality has a liberal bias, but at this point it seems like you’re really just spewing talking points, with no actually attempt to validate whether the nuance and details of anything you’re saying is true.

Okay, stop right there. Just stop. I don’t know who you’re trying to kid at this point; but it sure as shit isn’t me, and it appears that you’re primarily trying to convince yourself.

For a second, go back and read what I said and try - no matter how hard that is - to actually read it honestly, and try not deliberately try and be dishonest, or deflect away from the issue.


The wall has been billed as the primary solution to the problem. Supporters weren’t encouraged to chant “advocate for drug legalization to erode the support of criminal gangs in South America, and build a wall”.

Trump didn’t shut down the government over the inability for congress to pass legislation that helps support stabilization and democratic control of South American countries, in order to stabilize those countries.

Trump didn’t go on TV and say there is a crisis on the southern border that necessitates taking drastic action in order to eliminate the gang warfare, food insecurity and issues of violence in the primary countries that is driving the current uptick of immigration based on families.

If you don’t feel the rhetoric used, that the wall will stop Mexican rapists and drug dealers, the continual drum beat that a wall is needed and necessary to prevent illegal immigration was implying that the wall will provide a massive reduction and  substantial improvement of illegal immigration on the southern border - then you must be on crack.

I am not saying that the wall fall short of being a solution.


I am saying, that the wall can’t solve the problem to any meaningful degree because of all the facts you’re ignoring.

The wall will be built back from the border.  Immigrants can still cross into the US and legally claim asylum on US territory with or without wall.

The crisis you claimed was a crisis is occurring despite there being a “wall” already, and despite few of the individuals that entered actually crossing the wall.

This is not even touching the issues of tunnels, that drugs go through points of entry. 


It’s like you’re being willfully ignorant and deliberately dishonest, by simply ignoring the sheer extent of the issues with the wall, the sheer volume of scenarios that such a wall or fence will have little if any realistic effect.

I mean this is the whole point - that the fence at El Paso is experiencing a major spike in illegal immigration despite their being a physical barrier already.

What you’re doing is ignoring all of the issues, and instead trying to call democratic senators funny names, and claiming that it’s okay that the wall is having little meaningful effect on immigrant levels your trying to reduce, because no one said it would fully fix the problem.



The wall was the centerpiece of Trumps campaign, and has been billed throughout as some panacea, that we need a wall to reduce illegal immigration. But you, and most of the other conservatives in this thread don’t seem to have any actual comprehension or real understanding of the true nature of the problem being faced or human nature in general. 








.

Literally everyone who is not a fawning sycophant has disagreed. The wall hasn’t been built, nor is being built - it’s mostly just fencing of a similar nature to the type your ridiculing.

Of course feel free to show me where the wall has actually been built. I would show you the evidence of the non existent border wall, but it’s kinda hard to show a picture of something that doesn’t exist, or show you every square meter of the US Mexico border to show that every square meter lacks a wall.

If Trump has built more than the twenty meters of prototypes, he’d be parading in front of it every spare minute, tweeting photos of it all the time: and it should be trivial for you to show me a picture. So go ahead.

This is why we ridicule you for being willfully ignorant.

Trump isn’t building the wall, the fence he’s building clearly isn’t solving the problem he claimed it would.

Your response is that Democrats approved building the fence that got built and you now claim isn’t even working.

its not an answer to what I said, and is barely even coherent - it’s an irrational dodge. An attempt to say SOMETHING, ANYTHING, without having to concede either that what Trump is building doesn’t work, and he isn’t bothering to build what you say will fox the problem.

No, I literally explained it. There is a physical barrier - but it’s not on the border (the border is on the rio grande), so people can just cross the border onto American Soil, then wait to be picked up on the other side of the fence by border patrol to claim asylum. Much easier than risking death crossing the desert.

This is your problem, you support someone with an overly simplistic solution to solve your problems: but neither of you grasp the details or the complexity of the problem your trying to solve.

Illegal immigration isn’t like world war Z where your hiding from a hoard of unintelligent zombies who want to destroy you, yet if you pay close attention, this is effectively how the wall is subtly portrayed both by Trump and his supporters.

Yeah don’t argue with me.

My stubborn “facts” and “Reality” make it hard for petulant cretins to spew the misleading and intellectually bankrupt talking points.

Let me walk you through the problems. There are two of them.

The first is that Trump doesn’t seem to interested in building anything much better than the fence - so while you may argue to me that someone is going to build a big fabulous wall - that’s horseshit. Trump is building a fence so that people like you can feel like he fixed the problem.

And note, this is exactly why I have no respect for this sort of dishonesty. You know he’s not going to build the wall, I know he it, he knows it - yet you are still somehow pretending this is what is being proposed. It’s intellectually dishonesty solely for the purpose of making you feel more comfortable with your own doublethink.

How many of the 13,000 families that crossed the border, climbed over, burrowed under, or cut through the “wall”?

Want to Hazard an educated guess?

If the answer is close 13,000: then your education is remarkably poor. And in all likelihood you pulled the number out of your bury as it’s what you want to believe.

The border wall isn’t on the border. Immigrants can wade over the rio grande, and are on American soil. They then, legally claim asylum, and as they are families, can’t be easily deported back to their point of origin.

Im sorry this harms the narrative you want to believe: but the Crisis is a refugee crisis, not a criminal crisis or a “taking our jobs” crisis - a wall has no impact on that due to the above.

Wait... the CBP says that El Paso illegal immigration is reaching breaking point, and your saying the solution is building a wall?

Where?

In front of the existing wall at El Paso?

Quite obviously not.

Ramshutu here and there.

I was very off and on. For 8 years. Things went downhill when all the hardcore religious nut jobs stopped arguing evolution and started arguing for trump.

Yeah. Let’s stop this now.

Define “information”.

Yeah, I’m sorry you are completely unable to actually address any of the issues I’ve raised - but this says more about you than me.

Its pretty pathetic that you have no response to the key issues raised, and simply return to making the same assertions I’ve already challenged - then pretend as if you didn’t run away and fail to answer the primary questions.

Information, in the strict sense is merely a collection or pattern of things. What you’re doing is “begging the question”, you are implicitly defining information in a way that requires intelligence, asserting that DNA contains information, then feign surprise when you claim that DNA requires intelligence.

That response is why you’re ELO is lower than your self Esteem.

Bots, and accounts not controlled by real humans are not covered in the CoC. 

Is it acceptable for a vote to be placed by an account that isn’t being run or controlled by a real human being?

1.) yes D E C B A

2.) yea 

3.) yes

4.) yes

5.) yes

6.) yes

Tom Lehrer > Weird Al > All rappers

If you look at Creationist arguments over time, they actually fit into a set of basic types of argument:

1.) Strawmen: “if Evolution is true, why have we never seen a Crocoduck”, “why have we never seen a fly turn into not a fly” and similar aims at ridiculing evolution.

2.) Equivocation: “DNA contains information”, “evolution is just a theory/new information cannot be created”.

3.) Showing one thing - no matter how small - that isn’t fully explained by evolution - disproves evolution. Showing one thing - no matter how small - that is partially explained by creationism - proves creationism.

The sad things is that creationists are generally duped into the belief, then over time if they are interested in the science and evidence and start investigating: they are faced with what must be a tortuous choice of whether to remain creationist, or whether to remain honest. Too many chose the former.

Should be an easy vote: 

Yeah.

I’m not entirely sure what planet your on, but I’m going to let all that absurd nonsense be an issue for your therapist. Because I don’t really have the time to get into to all the issues with what you just said.

I guess what I should really do, is noob snipe, repeatedly message people to vote on my debates, and repeatedly tag anyone I think would vote for me in this thread and in the debate; the call people names when they vote against me. That’s the mark of a true champion!

Great debate if you want to hear RM being mercilessly and hilariously belittled over multiple debate rounds:

The issue is not noobs who don’t know the voting rules. It’s people - a person - creating sock puppet accounts or otherwise voting in the last minute of the debate and changing outcomes of debate.

If you could remove votes after the debate has ended - it would be a non issue.

A primary concern is that you prevent new voters being able to place votes on debates.

Depending on a medal that can be earned by clicking on a link, is not a barrier.

I agree with this sentiment.

These restrictions are intended to prevent sneaky sock puppets and nefarious voters from creating accounts to vote on their own debate. As far as I can tell, there are three ways a relatively lazy individual would do this now:

1.) Create an account. Vote. Few messages, few posts, no debates.

2.) Create an account: flurry of activity, vote. Long delay - Flurry of activity, vote.

and possibly 

3.) Create an account: flurry of activity to establish minimum standard. Vote.

Any restrictions should be targeted at those behaviours, not actual active members we know aren’t sock puppets.

If someone has established themselves as a consistent unique member, I would suggest they never lose their voting rights unless they’re just terrible at voting.

I would say

- 500 posts in the forum that aren’t just “blah, blah” and posted all in a day. OR

- 5 debates over at least a two week period that aren’t just forfeits or not attempting to genuinely debate, OR

- Special dispensation by the mod team after review of your account.