First of all, I must grudgingly agree with Sparcs comment that “we’re only human.” It may well be that, even if my idea is a good one in an ideal world, it is unworkable in the real world.
But…in my opinion…in an “ideal” thread in GD one would be able to remove all of the names of the posters and the thread would lose nothing. The arguments, positions and evidence would speak for themselves.
I’m firmly on the side of those who believe that debates don’t exist in a vacuum.
It is highly irritating having to retread the same ground in every (for example) gun control debate. We waste a huge amount of time and space refuting and restating the same arguments every single time. One of my opponents in particular consistently makes the same arguments every time, even though they have been thoroughly refuted numerous times, and he acts as though they are valid responses until they are refuted again in each thread.
It really tends to annoy, rather than to reinforce his position, and makes the discussion a waste of time.
Not only are positions relevant from thread to thread, but so are information and arguments that have already been presented. Everything builds on something else.
Maybe he doesn’t think his arguments have been refuted. We only have your opinion that his arguments have been refuted, this is just your perspective.
Can you provide us with links to all those threads so we can decide for ourselves please? (joke)
Anyway, he might be presenting common false arguments. Even if they are incorrect it does no harm to dispel them every now and again. New people are constantly arriving here and it does no harm to eradicate some of their ignorance.
I kinda agree with the OP.
Let’s say (for example) Person A generally holds a strong anti-abortion position but then they read somewhere a really good pro-abortion argument.
They may wish to post this pro-abortion argument here just to see where that line of inquiry takes him.
I think that it’s impossible to hold a belief on any issue unless you know about and have considered the opposing arguments.
Arguing the opposite of what you believe is an essential part of deciding what it is that you do believe. More people should do it.
It’s not trolling, it’s just testing your own belief system, a healthy undertaking in my opinion.
Another problem with bringing up positions from other threads is that sometimes two sentences only seem to be contradictory but actually are not. I do not know how many times I have typed a sentence that seemed inconsistent with something I had typed in a previous thread. When this occurs I always stop myself and analyze the topics in both threads to see how I could have come to contradictory conclusions. Every single time this has happened I have discovered that the two sentences were in fact not contradictory once I went over the reasoning behind each. If someone had brought up the apparent contradiction in one of the threads, I would have to explain how the two situations differ and how I came to what appears at first glance to be contradictory conclusions. If the topics are complex ones, this explanation can take quite a while and results in something of a hijacking of the thread. Fortunately this has not yet occurred, and I am quite glad that it hasn’t. I have to agree with the original poster’s point of view that bringing up previous posts is usually a bad idea that creates more problems than it solves.