And the more people who understand the argument, the more will realize it’s utterly without substance.
Everybody wins!
Heh heh, funnily enough erislover has just said “Hee, I get in defense mode and don’t know when to leave!” in the current thread about the timeless singularity at one end of our universe.
Well, I hope you at least find the OP of that thread educational and thought-provoking. I know you don’t frequent GD much any more, but please consider it a purveyor of original Wedgewood with a sign above the door saying “Bovines welcome”.
How can I refuse such a kind and earnest invitation from a friend? I’ll visit the thread. It is nearly time to end my self-review cycle anyway.
Until next time, thanks to all.
It seems to me that if you’re serious about this self-relection, you might address some of the points TVAA has made to you.
I don’t hang out in Great Debates, so I don’t know just how adversarial your relationship is, but he(?) had made some fairly direct observations, not all of which are snide.
Libertarian you are not eating enough greens, sit up straight! Did you clean your teeth this morning? And your hair doesn’t look like it has seen a brush in weeks. I hope you changed your socks, isn’t that the same t-shirt you wore yesterday? Have you tidied your room and made your bed?
I have a respectful question, Lib. How much do you really believe in this “I’m a Melancholy” schtick? I mean, you do have a winkie in there, and your Melancholy thread (the one that made threadspotting) was very funny, but sometimes you seem serious about the blood, phlegm, choler and bile stuff.
Of course, there’s a “I yam what I yam” threshold for everyone, but what’s the point of self-examination if your actions are to a large extent predetermined by your “temperament”? Just how much do you embrace the black bile?
I have a respectful question, Lib. How much do you really believe in this “I’m a Melancholy” schtick? I mean, you do have a winkie in there, and your Melancholy thread (the one that made threadspotting) was very funny, but sometimes you seem serious about the blood, phlegm, choler and bile stuff.
Of course, there’s a “I yam what I yam” threshold for everyone, but what’s the point of self-examination if your actions are to a large extent predetermined by your “temperament”? Just how much do you embrace the black bile?
The citing of rules of logic is not so much the problem I have as that sometimes you’ll say, for example, “this is a logical fallacy. Therefore I win” when such victory has not been so clearly demonstrated as you might believe. I know you well enough to think that in most of those cases you could refute the argument without having to rely solely on the rules of logic.
Think of it like this … many of us have an endgame … something that, if we play, it means the debate is essentially ours. Yours appears, in many cases, to be logic … if you can cite a fallacy as being essentially what someone is arguing from, then you have won.
Said victory is not always as apparent to others as it is to you.
I guess the best way to sum it up is to say that as obvious as logic makes things to you, it is not something that is obvious or important to everyone. Think of the average person going into GD. Citing MOA or poison pen or whatever might mean something to that person.
Or it might mean nothing. Tailor your argument to your audience, my friend:)
If I might venture a guess, it could have something to do with the fact that TVAA is trolling.
Libertarian
You may have already noticed this - or perhaps I’m completely wrong – but you seem to be on a predictable cycle. You’ll go along on a pretty even keel for a while and then you’ll start to get irascible. Soon, you’re having a near meltdown. After a brief break, you’ll come back on an even keel again, at least until the next time.
One of these days, this may get you banned, which would be a real shame. Perhaps you could learn to see these episodes coming and start your SDMB break a day or two early. Maybe you could go out and kick the dog or something rather than posting. This might avoid a lot of stress and agravation, both for you and the SDMB as a whole. Of course, the dog might not like it much.
Then again, I’m often wrong 
I say you don`t change a damn thing.
What this board needs is an injection of personality that makes it unique. It has that. Thanks to everyone here, including yourself.
If I was forced at gun-point I would encourage you to reduce the complexity of your verbage so the rest of us can follow you with a more intimate understanding. Take a little more time to explain the point in plain language.
I look forward to reading a majority of your posts and I enjoy your occasional drive by wit.
To contradict myself, sometimes your complex verbage and precise use is just what is needed to make the point.
Your counter(s) to Cervaise is one particular thread a while back was just what the thread needed.
God Bless.
On a personal note, when I first came to SDMB last fall, my first impression of you was quite favorabe. I thought, This is someone that I can learn from. But you seemed to have blinders on and didn’t appear particularly interested in anything that couldn’t be approached with a sort of cold logic. That may be so natural to you that it isn’t even worth thinking about altering in any way.
We share some common interests in the Cherokee. I would have liked to have known more of this side of you. And maybe you could have found something worthwhile in me.
Au contraire, cherie. Trolling is posting merely to get a response – it requires posts that have no valuable points and contribute nothing to the discussion. In other words, utterly unlike your posts to the “Why are women more superstitious then men?” thread.
My posts are utterly germane: Lib asked for criticism, and criticism he’ll get.
Normally, I wouldn’t be this ascerbic. But after Libertarian’s monologue on how he knew I respected his intelligence and recognized that his arguments were really right all along… well.
I’m not sure that’s possible, punha, since the Libertarian Experiment, as described by Lib, has never been tried. So all we have are the rules of a hypothetical Libertaria, as described by Lib, and the hypothetical problems presented by others. Until an army of libertarians takes over a chunk of Afghanistan or inland west Africa to run as a pure libertarian state, such threads can be nothing but hypotheticals. Some of them are more farfetched than others, such as the infamous sentient giant squids. But that’s the only difference. With apologies to The Preacher, “Hypotheticals, hypotheticals, all is hypotheticals.”
Lib, I would second the oft-stated complaint about your tendency toward those extremely brief, cryptic posts.
The point of words on a message board is to communicate with the other posters. Sometimes I think you’re striving to create the verbal equivalent of some sort of minimalist work of modern art, a thing of great beauty to the artist but unintelligible to almost everyone else.
BTW, I’m still trying to make sense of our discussion in Airman Doors’ “Are you gonna ban rocks next?” thread. Although I think that has less to do with the point of my previous two paragraphs, and more with an occasionally obsessive nitpickiness on your part - about logic? about grammar? about some combination of the two? Damned if I know. The further you took things in our discussion within the thread, the less it seemed to have to do with any point that might have been germane to the larger discussion.
Well at least you got one syllable right.
Playing with yourself in the pit is really quite unbecoming.
Perhaps you sincerely believe that you need everyone to spank you so you can make yourself a better person, but it strikes me as just as narcissistic and mastabatory as the “You made me cry and I’m leaving now” pit threads posted every so often by random newbies.
And it still amazes me that you expect to discuss your special philosophy without subjecting it to reasonable analysis using case studies. You have become so fond of rejecting any case study by tossing the words giant squid around that any sincere attempt to explore the ramifications of libertarianism gets scuttled.
And you are too willing to inject the concept of libertarianism into seemingly any and every discussion. I will be looking at seemingly innocuous non-political threads and be unpleasantly surprised by big steaming piles of coercion and authoritarianism!.