OCTOBER 2021 UPDATE:
*low golf clap*
YYAAAAAAYYYY
NICE GOING, geniuses.
And now, the latest in "Why We Can't Have Nice Things":
I guess it's something of an accomplishment that it took till eight years after I catalogued all the zombie-mindless, constantly looping shaggery in kit discussion threads - ongoing at least a decade before that - for one or two of "us" finally to step on our cranks.
What's that, you say? If all those kool-aid swilling True Believers get to turn everything to personal attacks, then why can't you respond in kind? Eye for an eye, fight fire with fire 'n all that?
Well, seeing that the moral argument is based on the critics being the objective ones, a scorched-earth retort is maybe a bit problematic? We're supposed to have the rhetorical advantage. We're supposed to be the rational ones, with observations based on, y'know, actual mathematical RATIOS. Those trademark jihadi histrionics that inevitably scuttle certain discussion threads have all historically started with the other side, time and time again, and to drop to the same level is to erode the rectitude of our position.
But some of you weren't content even to keep it to that level of diminishment, oh no. You had to go after somebody of long-term prominence in this hobby, who's rightly earned some respect for his nigh-incomparable contributions, who even more importantly hasn't had a bad thing to say about anyone. Call him a "shill".
You couldn't even aim at a properly target-rich environment. You had to gun for the guy who deserved it the least. To paraphrase Terry Jessee, "Tim Boyd? Really? You all should be ASHAMED of yourselves."
I sure as hell had nothing to say to that. Nobody of any right mind would.
Consider the magnitude of your accomplishment: you have now vaporized any high ground we stood on, blown it to PIZZA TOPPINGS. For the better part of two decades, they had NNNOTHING to validate their pearl-clutching and their cackling Chicken-Little doomsday scenarios for the hobby... but in one stroke, you have now justified everything.
All their PUNK-ass gaslighting, all their ugly little chickenscat victory laps over this incident, now have real traction. After a character assault like the one you deployed, it's as if all their holy-writ maladjustment and improvised explosive diatribes have been at least canceled out if not wiped entirely clean.
All 'cause YOU COULDN'T KEEP IT ZIPPED.
So yeah, congrats.
Gold star to you.
And thanks for single-handedly yanking the teeth out of everything that follows here.
March 13, 2013:
I'm putting this up to address the tactics of those who oppose kit critiques for two reasons: first, people inevitably lose track of the fact that it's really these tactics driving a given thread off topic, more than the responses to them; and second, because no matter how comprehensively and repeatedly these sad old maneuvers are discredited, there's a contingent out there who just can't seem to resist reanimating them - to such a degree, I might as well anticipate and debunk them all one more time in a single linkable piece, rather than repeat the points again and again from thread to thread. It'll go on for a bit, because the idea is to point people to individual items on the list, not the entire blog.
1) Claiming "There's no such thing as a perfect kit". Simple enough; when people point out an inaccuracy or a processing problem in a kit, they usually have proof that can't be disputed. So what the objector does is to escalate the observation of that inaccuracy into a demand for a perfect kit just to have something to attack. The real argument - "this part of the kit is a problem and here's why" - has fangs; but a ridiculous caricature of it won't, hence the term "straw man argument".
So, in no particular order:
1) Claiming "There's no such thing as a perfect kit". Simple enough; when people point out an inaccuracy or a processing problem in a kit, they usually have proof that can't be disputed. So what the objector does is to escalate the observation of that inaccuracy into a demand for a perfect kit just to have something to attack. The real argument - "this part of the kit is a problem and here's why" - has fangs; but a ridiculous caricature of it won't, hence the term "straw man argument".
It's probably just an artifact of the reality that you have to put "boo hoo" and "manufacturer X is Satan himself" language into the mouths of critics to make them look ridiculous, when all that's usually necessary to accomplish the same with objectors is to quote them directly. Through innumerable discussions, I have yet to see where the "perfect kit" exaggeration has any basis in fact. Anybody who can quote an example of a critic even IMPLYING a demand for a perfect kit is welcome to do so in the comment section.
2) False dichotomies (making believe "A" and "B" are mutually exclusive when they aren't) and false equivalencies (saying "A" always = "B" when it really doesn't). The "Kit Assembler" canard is tailor-made for this heading. The assumption is that people who criticize kits only do so out of an unwillingness or outright inability to correct the faults they find; critics = "kit assemblers", rather than presumably more skilled and accomplished modelers. Taken to its logical conclusion, not only would this line of (non)thought excuse a pinewood derby kit in a Rat Roaster box (MAKE what you want of it, are you a MODELER or not?), it would also encompass some critics who are in fact very skilled and accomplished builders. Try that "kit-assembler" thing on Bill Geary or Terry Jessee and see if you don't get laughed out of the room - and rightly so. Other examples: you can't take a kit's faults seriously without neglecting truly serious issues in life, if everything's so horrible you might as well go straight to the aftermarket, and one particularly inane and rationally bankrupt old favorite: you only notice kit problems 'cause you don't have a life.
3) Credential-challenging. "Just what have YOU built?""Where's YOUR portfolio?" "When YOU can produce a more accurate kit, let us know". Right. And unless you're a George Lucas-scale director yourself, you have NO BUSINESS judging the Star Wars prequels as inferior to the original trilogy. Just stick those calipers and reference photos where the sun don't shine, son - your sad little kit-assembling arse is out of its league describing anything that doesn't match the 1:1 unless you can carve a better master yourself. Uh-huh.
One of the more novel permutations of this recently is the whole notion that kit critics don't hold their own builds to the same standards they try to hold manufacturers to... ? Eh-hex-cuse me?? A modeler pays a minimum now of about 25 dollars - often more - for a kit, with a certain expectation of accuracy. Just who is paying the builder to meet those same expectations? In a sea of beaten and pathetic retreads, this little twist certainly gets a point or two for sorely needed originality; but until a builder has an implied contract to meet, it gets no Cohiba as a rational defense for this pathological opposition to pointing out any flaw in a given kit.
4) Agitating over supposedly premature analysis of pre-production samples. Sorry, but experience is a steadfast and nigh-unfailing contradictor on this one. There have just been TOO MANY TIMES a flat wheel arch or a squished greenhouse or a billowy fender section sailed right through the development process to look just as funky on the shelf and in the painted plastic as it did in the prototype stages we're sometimes privileged to see. You'd think all the righteous chuffing about how "I'll just wait till I have it in my hands" would have kinda piped down a bit after untold decades of this, but then again, we're not describing a mindset characterized by a willingness to learn, here.
5) Claiming criticism will drive a manufacturer to stop developing new tools. In a long sad line of self-defeating premises, this one shoots itself in the foot even quicker than most. It presumes that since key personnel from model manufacturers occasionally have a peep in these forums, they'll get so offended at the criticism they see, they'll just stop producing new kits in a catastrophic fit of pique.
Uh... they go out of business if they do that. Which is probably why there's, y'know, no historical precedent to support this delusion.
Now, one could claim that homing in on flaws is negative, and in the strictest sense, without any context, this is true. But from corrected '69 Charger bodies through retooled GT500 intakes to supplying the promised '50 Olds tampo-printed tires free of charge, Revell, for example, actually responds well to a certain amount of "negativity"; they've stayed in business well-nigh these 70 years by being grown-ups that way, not by being spiteful imbeciles. Where they really need positivity is out of a modeler's wallet. That's how the military boys do it, and it's worked out pretty well for them so far.
6) High-friction "Slippery Slopes". This segment concerns itself with "can't please all the people all the time", "one man's trash is another man's treasure" - really, any shopworn aphorism used to heave the fact that no two modelers see things exactly alike down a rough and scrabbly grade into an excuse not to hold model manufacturers to any kind of account. One modeler won't kvetch about filled fins, but might not like flat fender arches. The next is more than happy to file and fill fender arches into shape, but doesn't appreciate correcting drip molding arcs. The next guy is happy to fix all that and be all righteous and haughty about what a "real modeler" he is, and the NEXT guy doesn't want to do any of that, wants the accuracy most Japanese manufacturers are now routinely providing in fact, and doesn't even particularly care if you call him a "kit assembler" for it 'cause his self-esteem doesn't exactly hinge on his hobbies. How can a manufacturer possibly determine what it can get away with, what problems to fix and what might go under the radar with so many different radars out there?
Let's pretend for a moment that this angle isn't immediately short-circuited and crushed flat by the fact that there will be L E S S C O N T R O V E R S Y if the manufacturer just GETS ALL THAT STUFF RIGHT TO START WITH. There is still a clear difference between a model that demands comparison with 1:1 photos to ferret out the most marginal nits to pick, and one that so assaults you with its faults just based on your recollection of the 1:1, you don't even need reference photos to recognize them. And you don't need Stephen Hawking's reasoning capacity to see that distinction in online feedback, even if you don't necessarily catch the deviations yourself.
"The S-curvature in the Pitman Arm is off by half a degree" - that's one foil-hat extreme. But grid lines laying hickeys bare in photo comparisons, on the other hand, or dramatically improving the look of a master by photo-chopping it in the run to a 17-page consensus in an online discussion forum... well sorry Houston, but we've had a problem. And characterizing exactly which problems merit attention just ain't the rocket surgery some would have you believe.
7) Previous failures used to rationalize current ones. Let's pretend again, this time that bringing up kit Y from the '70s and kit Z from the '80s isn't TOTALLY OFF-TOPIC when we're discussing kit X released last week. One of the favorite key phrases to watch for in this tactic is, "Isn't it funny that...", or "funny, but..." - as in, "funny, but this older version has the same roof height problem (in 1/24 no less, so it's even worse) and yet nobody complained about it."
Gee, could it be because that last version was released in 1998, when instant global feedback wasn't q u i t e what it is now? Could it be that the "monstrosity mash of 1/24 and 1/25 scales" is a tree that actually does occasionally fall for such a moribund diversion, even if you aren't there to hear the sound?
"Funny how manufacturers have been selectively compressing roof lines for years, and yet nobody's noticed that in another significant new release from this same manufacturer" (well, aside from at least one nationally published review that actually HAS made an issue of it). Could it be that some more curvaceous designs hide such dimensional fudging far better than the rectilinear ones so stridently offended by that technique?
And of course, nobody ever states explicitly just WHY this alleged inconsistency of observation is so "funny"- probably because the risk of a humiliating logical face-plant amidst a sea of empirical comparative data is astronomically high, should he choose to turn the aggression a little more active with such a rickety premise.
But before we leave the subject entirely, let's repurpose the approach. How about an "Isn't-it-funny" of a DIFFERENT stripe: isn't it funny how a page dedicated to building a controversial model - a page which, it must be said, made a pretty smug and self-satisfied declaration of its positive aims - DISAPPEARS from public view on Facebook just as it's becoming self-evident all the "positivity" is coming at a distinctly negative expense to some fellow hobbyists attacked publicly on that page. Only the authors know for sure, but for all appearances, here are Zuckerberg's own minions boxing their ears with a straight-up, cause-and-effect display of the wrong-headedness of it all - but no, it's everybody else who needs to change their attitudes. Ri-ight?
Okay, sure. This funny business does have its charms.
8) The alleged inability to criticize a product without trashing the people who manufactured it. With this false equivalency prevalent enough to demand its own special mention, we're again obliged to be generous and set aside the immediate obvious contradiction, that criticizing a product isn't even necessarily to trash the product itself. In one of the more admirably head-spinning tag team efforts seen in a recent discussion, by accident or by design, one participant posed a question apropos of really nothing in that thread: "Well, if it took firing somebody to get the results you all want, would you be okay with that?" And when the half-hearted "maybes" started percolating (along with a more vehement answer, significantly, from someone whose career is in manufacturing and design) the stage was set for another intrepid poster to pule about how his deeply personal attacks were deleted while everyone else got to "trash" the team that produced the kit in question. That's a pretty staggering amount of brass from the side that inevitably turns any kit review discussion ad hominem first, and it's an attitude to shame and embarrass any sensible "ambassador" of the hobby.
9) Baiting the critics irrespective of any antecedent, a late entry so obvious it should have been here from the very beginning. How about those discussion threads anticipating the latest Hot New Kit where someone starts jabbing at the "whiners" before anyone has even begun to criticize the kit? You've seen 'em. "SURE HOPE PEOPLE DON'T WHINE ABOUT THIS ONE LIKE SOME (insert underhanded pejorative of choice)." Which usually prompts the catcall, "OH YOU JUST KNOW SOMEBODY'S GONNA!"
And since we're on the subject of those pathetic, craven little fishing expeditions, when is the last time you saw a critic beatin' the bush like that, sayin' "OoOoOoOo, they'd better not screw this one up!"
You haven't. And there's a very good reason for that: objectors often overmatch critics for the very compulsions they deride. And nothing proves it like that chicken-scat little sandbox baiting game the objector likes to play. Seriously, do these objectors have visions of critics in their closets or under their beds? Are their dreamscapes so haunted by specters of critics burning their cherished kit manufacturers to the ground, that even when there's been NO stone cast at a product in a given discussion, they still JUST CAN'T LEAVE IT ALONE? Just what is it that gets into an objector's medulla and twists it so hard, he can't help tilting at windmills and swiping at shadows when there's nothing there to attack?
And it's not just the preemptive strikes. How about those incidents, and they are legion, you know you've seen them, when the objectors just can't seem to shut up about critics who've by and large piped down about a given kit's issues?
You work for a kit manufacturer, that's one thing. But if you don't, then it is simply NOT YOUR PLACE to appropriate this kind of righteous indignation.
10) Referencing "Rivet Counting" or calling someone a "rivet-counter". Because we car modelers just generally have lower standards than our military counterparts, the armor and aircraft guys get better toys - such that you literally have to count rivets to find something wrong with most of their kits (and some sure do). But the quality in even the latest car model tooling is yet inconsistent enough that you don't have to go anywhere near that extreme to see the problems some new kits have.
This is not to say that car modeling entirely lacks that sort of OCD, but the mature response is, "gee, don't you think it's a little silly to dismiss an entire model because the wiper motor is a two-speed instead of a three?" But what the objector tries to do is hammer anybody who notes any inaccuracy, no matter how significant, into the mentality of the punctilious miserable rivet counter. With a perfectly straight face, the objector tries to sell you the notion that a totally inaccurate 1/25 chassis is just the same as missing one out of a hundred 1/350 rivets, with results predictably laughable to everyone except apparently the objector himself (and his partisans).
This is why deploying rivet-counting even as a general principle for the problems we find in new car model tooling is to drop the IQ of the entire discussion by about 50 points. It's name-calling, it's bullying and juvenile, almost panicky in its drive to characterize any less-than-rosy observation as "bashing", "whining", "pissing", "moaning"; and how anybody can deploy it outside a context of hysteria and total thoughtlessness is beyond me. Just be mindful of a certain shaky moral ground in resorting to terms like "mediocrophile" or the especially adept "accurophobe" should you ever get mired in that sort of muck... even if you're only fighting fire with fire.
What's it all got in common? Whether it's that quieter neurotic picking at myriad straw men that aren't really the point of the discussion, or any of the more artless and maladjusted "DON'T LIKE IT, DON'T BUY IT, GET A LIFE" broadsides, there's a hard truth at the root of all this that nobody can do anything about: a model by its definition is supposed to represent a subject, and there's a rational basis for disappointment in a kit that doesn't represent a subject as well as might reasonably be expected. There's NO rational basis for attacking someone for expressing that disappointment.
There might be a legitimate refutation of certain extremes to which that disappointment is expressed, but you have to be fair and honest in your assessment of it. The objector's awe-inspiring inability to do this is a thread that runs through all these tactics.
And what's especially galling is that deployers of these beaten and decomposing mockeries of logic have every appearance of conviction they're doing it for the good of the hobby when in fact they're achieving the exact opposite. What's the purpose of an online forum about car models if not a free exchange of information and OPINIONS about car models? The true negative nannies - the real rivet counters - make themselves plenty plain without the help of rabid reactionaries lumping everyone who has any criticism into the same group. And what happens as a result? Thither, the modeler with helpful fixes for an Impala kit is hectored into silence, and yon the modelers most responsible for corrections to a Hudson kit are badgered into quitting a given forum out of frustration. Again, an invitation to the comment section: explain to class, please, how this helps the car modeling hobby progress and grow.
So, for those who continue to recycle these cliches, take it under advisement: there's no quicker and more decisive way to batter your own credibility to a pulp.
2) False dichotomies (making believe "A" and "B" are mutually exclusive when they aren't) and false equivalencies (saying "A" always = "B" when it really doesn't). The "Kit Assembler" canard is tailor-made for this heading. The assumption is that people who criticize kits only do so out of an unwillingness or outright inability to correct the faults they find; critics = "kit assemblers", rather than presumably more skilled and accomplished modelers. Taken to its logical conclusion, not only would this line of (non)thought excuse a pinewood derby kit in a Rat Roaster box (MAKE what you want of it, are you a MODELER or not?), it would also encompass some critics who are in fact very skilled and accomplished builders. Try that "kit-assembler" thing on Bill Geary or Terry Jessee and see if you don't get laughed out of the room - and rightly so. Other examples: you can't take a kit's faults seriously without neglecting truly serious issues in life, if everything's so horrible you might as well go straight to the aftermarket, and one particularly inane and rationally bankrupt old favorite: you only notice kit problems 'cause you don't have a life.
3) Credential-challenging. "Just what have YOU built?""Where's YOUR portfolio?" "When YOU can produce a more accurate kit, let us know". Right. And unless you're a George Lucas-scale director yourself, you have NO BUSINESS judging the Star Wars prequels as inferior to the original trilogy. Just stick those calipers and reference photos where the sun don't shine, son - your sad little kit-assembling arse is out of its league describing anything that doesn't match the 1:1 unless you can carve a better master yourself. Uh-huh.
One of the more novel permutations of this recently is the whole notion that kit critics don't hold their own builds to the same standards they try to hold manufacturers to... ? Eh-hex-cuse me?? A modeler pays a minimum now of about 25 dollars - often more - for a kit, with a certain expectation of accuracy. Just who is paying the builder to meet those same expectations? In a sea of beaten and pathetic retreads, this little twist certainly gets a point or two for sorely needed originality; but until a builder has an implied contract to meet, it gets no Cohiba as a rational defense for this pathological opposition to pointing out any flaw in a given kit.
4) Agitating over supposedly premature analysis of pre-production samples. Sorry, but experience is a steadfast and nigh-unfailing contradictor on this one. There have just been TOO MANY TIMES a flat wheel arch or a squished greenhouse or a billowy fender section sailed right through the development process to look just as funky on the shelf and in the painted plastic as it did in the prototype stages we're sometimes privileged to see. You'd think all the righteous chuffing about how "I'll just wait till I have it in my hands" would have kinda piped down a bit after untold decades of this, but then again, we're not describing a mindset characterized by a willingness to learn, here.
5) Claiming criticism will drive a manufacturer to stop developing new tools. In a long sad line of self-defeating premises, this one shoots itself in the foot even quicker than most. It presumes that since key personnel from model manufacturers occasionally have a peep in these forums, they'll get so offended at the criticism they see, they'll just stop producing new kits in a catastrophic fit of pique.
Uh... they go out of business if they do that. Which is probably why there's, y'know, no historical precedent to support this delusion.
Now, one could claim that homing in on flaws is negative, and in the strictest sense, without any context, this is true. But from corrected '69 Charger bodies through retooled GT500 intakes to supplying the promised '50 Olds tampo-printed tires free of charge, Revell, for example, actually responds well to a certain amount of "negativity"; they've stayed in business well-nigh these 70 years by being grown-ups that way, not by being spiteful imbeciles. Where they really need positivity is out of a modeler's wallet. That's how the military boys do it, and it's worked out pretty well for them so far.
6) High-friction "Slippery Slopes". This segment concerns itself with "can't please all the people all the time", "one man's trash is another man's treasure" - really, any shopworn aphorism used to heave the fact that no two modelers see things exactly alike down a rough and scrabbly grade into an excuse not to hold model manufacturers to any kind of account. One modeler won't kvetch about filled fins, but might not like flat fender arches. The next is more than happy to file and fill fender arches into shape, but doesn't appreciate correcting drip molding arcs. The next guy is happy to fix all that and be all righteous and haughty about what a "real modeler" he is, and the NEXT guy doesn't want to do any of that, wants the accuracy most Japanese manufacturers are now routinely providing in fact, and doesn't even particularly care if you call him a "kit assembler" for it 'cause his self-esteem doesn't exactly hinge on his hobbies. How can a manufacturer possibly determine what it can get away with, what problems to fix and what might go under the radar with so many different radars out there?
Let's pretend for a moment that this angle isn't immediately short-circuited and crushed flat by the fact that there will be L E S S C O N T R O V E R S Y if the manufacturer just GETS ALL THAT STUFF RIGHT TO START WITH. There is still a clear difference between a model that demands comparison with 1:1 photos to ferret out the most marginal nits to pick, and one that so assaults you with its faults just based on your recollection of the 1:1, you don't even need reference photos to recognize them. And you don't need Stephen Hawking's reasoning capacity to see that distinction in online feedback, even if you don't necessarily catch the deviations yourself.
"The S-curvature in the Pitman Arm is off by half a degree" - that's one foil-hat extreme. But grid lines laying hickeys bare in photo comparisons, on the other hand, or dramatically improving the look of a master by photo-chopping it in the run to a 17-page consensus in an online discussion forum... well sorry Houston, but we've had a problem. And characterizing exactly which problems merit attention just ain't the rocket surgery some would have you believe.
7) Previous failures used to rationalize current ones. Let's pretend again, this time that bringing up kit Y from the '70s and kit Z from the '80s isn't TOTALLY OFF-TOPIC when we're discussing kit X released last week. One of the favorite key phrases to watch for in this tactic is, "Isn't it funny that...", or "funny, but..." - as in, "funny, but this older version has the same roof height problem (in 1/24 no less, so it's even worse) and yet nobody complained about it."
Gee, could it be because that last version was released in 1998, when instant global feedback wasn't q u i t e what it is now? Could it be that the "monstrosity mash of 1/24 and 1/25 scales" is a tree that actually does occasionally fall for such a moribund diversion, even if you aren't there to hear the sound?
"Funny how manufacturers have been selectively compressing roof lines for years, and yet nobody's noticed that in another significant new release from this same manufacturer" (well, aside from at least one nationally published review that actually HAS made an issue of it). Could it be that some more curvaceous designs hide such dimensional fudging far better than the rectilinear ones so stridently offended by that technique?
And of course, nobody ever states explicitly just WHY this alleged inconsistency of observation is so "funny"- probably because the risk of a humiliating logical face-plant amidst a sea of empirical comparative data is astronomically high, should he choose to turn the aggression a little more active with such a rickety premise.
But before we leave the subject entirely, let's repurpose the approach. How about an "Isn't-it-funny" of a DIFFERENT stripe: isn't it funny how a page dedicated to building a controversial model - a page which, it must be said, made a pretty smug and self-satisfied declaration of its positive aims - DISAPPEARS from public view on Facebook just as it's becoming self-evident all the "positivity" is coming at a distinctly negative expense to some fellow hobbyists attacked publicly on that page. Only the authors know for sure, but for all appearances, here are Zuckerberg's own minions boxing their ears with a straight-up, cause-and-effect display of the wrong-headedness of it all - but no, it's everybody else who needs to change their attitudes. Ri-ight?
Okay, sure. This funny business does have its charms.
8) The alleged inability to criticize a product without trashing the people who manufactured it. With this false equivalency prevalent enough to demand its own special mention, we're again obliged to be generous and set aside the immediate obvious contradiction, that criticizing a product isn't even necessarily to trash the product itself. In one of the more admirably head-spinning tag team efforts seen in a recent discussion, by accident or by design, one participant posed a question apropos of really nothing in that thread: "Well, if it took firing somebody to get the results you all want, would you be okay with that?" And when the half-hearted "maybes" started percolating (along with a more vehement answer, significantly, from someone whose career is in manufacturing and design) the stage was set for another intrepid poster to pule about how his deeply personal attacks were deleted while everyone else got to "trash" the team that produced the kit in question. That's a pretty staggering amount of brass from the side that inevitably turns any kit review discussion ad hominem first, and it's an attitude to shame and embarrass any sensible "ambassador" of the hobby.
9) Baiting the critics irrespective of any antecedent, a late entry so obvious it should have been here from the very beginning. How about those discussion threads anticipating the latest Hot New Kit where someone starts jabbing at the "whiners" before anyone has even begun to criticize the kit? You've seen 'em. "SURE HOPE PEOPLE DON'T WHINE ABOUT THIS ONE LIKE SOME (insert underhanded pejorative of choice)." Which usually prompts the catcall, "OH YOU JUST KNOW SOMEBODY'S GONNA!"
And since we're on the subject of those pathetic, craven little fishing expeditions, when is the last time you saw a critic beatin' the bush like that, sayin' "OoOoOoOo, they'd better not screw this one up!"
You haven't. And there's a very good reason for that: objectors often overmatch critics for the very compulsions they deride. And nothing proves it like that chicken-scat little sandbox baiting game the objector likes to play. Seriously, do these objectors have visions of critics in their closets or under their beds? Are their dreamscapes so haunted by specters of critics burning their cherished kit manufacturers to the ground, that even when there's been NO stone cast at a product in a given discussion, they still JUST CAN'T LEAVE IT ALONE? Just what is it that gets into an objector's medulla and twists it so hard, he can't help tilting at windmills and swiping at shadows when there's nothing there to attack?
And it's not just the preemptive strikes. How about those incidents, and they are legion, you know you've seen them, when the objectors just can't seem to shut up about critics who've by and large piped down about a given kit's issues?
You work for a kit manufacturer, that's one thing. But if you don't, then it is simply NOT YOUR PLACE to appropriate this kind of righteous indignation.
10) Referencing "Rivet Counting" or calling someone a "rivet-counter". Because we car modelers just generally have lower standards than our military counterparts, the armor and aircraft guys get better toys - such that you literally have to count rivets to find something wrong with most of their kits (and some sure do). But the quality in even the latest car model tooling is yet inconsistent enough that you don't have to go anywhere near that extreme to see the problems some new kits have.
This is not to say that car modeling entirely lacks that sort of OCD, but the mature response is, "gee, don't you think it's a little silly to dismiss an entire model because the wiper motor is a two-speed instead of a three?" But what the objector tries to do is hammer anybody who notes any inaccuracy, no matter how significant, into the mentality of the punctilious miserable rivet counter. With a perfectly straight face, the objector tries to sell you the notion that a totally inaccurate 1/25 chassis is just the same as missing one out of a hundred 1/350 rivets, with results predictably laughable to everyone except apparently the objector himself (and his partisans).
This is why deploying rivet-counting even as a general principle for the problems we find in new car model tooling is to drop the IQ of the entire discussion by about 50 points. It's name-calling, it's bullying and juvenile, almost panicky in its drive to characterize any less-than-rosy observation as "bashing", "whining", "pissing", "moaning"; and how anybody can deploy it outside a context of hysteria and total thoughtlessness is beyond me. Just be mindful of a certain shaky moral ground in resorting to terms like "mediocrophile" or the especially adept "accurophobe" should you ever get mired in that sort of muck... even if you're only fighting fire with fire.
What's it all got in common? Whether it's that quieter neurotic picking at myriad straw men that aren't really the point of the discussion, or any of the more artless and maladjusted "DON'T LIKE IT, DON'T BUY IT, GET A LIFE" broadsides, there's a hard truth at the root of all this that nobody can do anything about: a model by its definition is supposed to represent a subject, and there's a rational basis for disappointment in a kit that doesn't represent a subject as well as might reasonably be expected. There's NO rational basis for attacking someone for expressing that disappointment.
There might be a legitimate refutation of certain extremes to which that disappointment is expressed, but you have to be fair and honest in your assessment of it. The objector's awe-inspiring inability to do this is a thread that runs through all these tactics.
And what's especially galling is that deployers of these beaten and decomposing mockeries of logic have every appearance of conviction they're doing it for the good of the hobby when in fact they're achieving the exact opposite. What's the purpose of an online forum about car models if not a free exchange of information and OPINIONS about car models? The true negative nannies - the real rivet counters - make themselves plenty plain without the help of rabid reactionaries lumping everyone who has any criticism into the same group. And what happens as a result? Thither, the modeler with helpful fixes for an Impala kit is hectored into silence, and yon the modelers most responsible for corrections to a Hudson kit are badgered into quitting a given forum out of frustration. Again, an invitation to the comment section: explain to class, please, how this helps the car modeling hobby progress and grow.
So, for those who continue to recycle these cliches, take it under advisement: there's no quicker and more decisive way to batter your own credibility to a pulp.
