Except that bailing on a discussion once you’ve started it is not the same thing as declining a new one. What you are really saying is “If I can’t control the debate then I just don’t wanna play at all”
The possible length of my answers has nothing to do with it being a tangent. Considering the length of our discussion about Jesus teachings on wealth I find your suggestion here pretty unrealistic. The length and lack of any resolution in that thread is what prompted my decline to start off on a new discussion in this one.
Wow, that is really funny. You say this as if it’s a positive assertion for you. Guess what? It ain’t. See if you can figure out why.
Except that bailing on a discussion once you’ve started it is not the same thing as declining a new one. What you are really saying is “If I can’t control the debate then I just don’t wanna play at all”
Yes it really is a tangent. We weren’t discussing divorce or marrige or anything close when you brought it up. Considering the length of our discussion about Jesus teachings on wealth I find your suggestion here pretty unrealistic. The length and lack of any resolution in that thread is what prompted my decline to start off on a new discussion in this one.
Wow, that is really funny. You say this as if it’s a positive assertion for you. Guess what? It ain’t. See if you can figure out why.
He can’t be much of a hero to you. A look back at our actual exchange:
At this point you backed off all discussion of Emerson and didn’t answer my question. After a couple of tries, I gave up. You still haven’t made any effort to discuss him or his philosophy.
The source for the research information is the American Transcendentalism Web under “Legacy of Transcendentalism: Religion and Philosophy.”
I can provide many, many other sources if you like. (I taught Emerson’s poetry and essays and background for twenty years.)
I have neither mangled his ideas nor painted him as a champion of devout religious thought.
I pity your students, then. to have been taught Emerson by an imbecile like you. I am completely uninterested in proving my credentials, or engaging in a conversation of any kind, with a ninny such as yourself. You want to talk about Emerson? Find someone who cares, preferably by opening up a separate thread, and seeing who engages you in your observations about him, whom you don’t begin to understand.
I won’t be joining that thread. Neither, I suspect, will anyone else.
All I did was ask you a question. You are spending considerably more time saying why you won’t answer it than it would have taken for you to give an answer. It must be a very scary question for you.
Sure, I’ll agree to that. And what it looks like you’re saying is “If I know I’m about to get my ass kicked, I don’t want to play at all.” Perhaps you should go sit on the sidelines with Tom and Poly.
That may be, you did seem a little slow. But then answering what your beliefs are on divorce and remarriage, or whether you thought it possible for Jesus to err, does not really give you much need to study does it? BTW, why are you talking anymore anyway? I thought you were content to let others judge me?
Since your question is similar to the one I’ve got pending from Polycarp, I’ll try to answer both at once.
There are several reasons a poster might decline to answer a direct question, some legitimate and some less so. It’s not as though any avoidance of or evasion to a question must equate with a similar avoidance in another poster’s mind.
For example, I plan on never giving Zoe the benefit of a courteous response again to any question because I think she’s a –what was **badchad’**s phrase?—mush-brain, out to start up shit with me, obsessed with showing that I’m faking my background, and determined to refuse to see any merit in my posts. Responding to such a person is just to encourage her, with almost no upside. This we may call an evasion of policy: I see her name, and a light goes on: “Don’t bother taking her seriously. She’s of no consequence.” If **Zoe ** wants to label me a coward, or unable to handle her fine mind, that’s okay with me, because I have zero respect for any drool coming from her toothless mouth.
Other avoidances of policy are more selective: Tom insists he isn’t going to discuss the subject of belief, except of course he is constantly discussing that subject necessarily in a thread on religion. He just pulls that chestnut out whenever the subject of belief arises AND Tom suspects, probably rightly, that his beliefs will be used to embarrass him. So he rants on (and on and on) about how discussing beliefs is a violation of the UN charter, or some such silly shit.
Some avoidances are just practical. I really did have to work out earlier, and it’s entirely possible that when I came back, I might have forgotten about Polycarp’s request. Justly, he might have thought that my forgetting was deliberate and then demanded somewhat uncivilly that I answer him NOW, to which I might have thought, “Oh, fuck you and your demands—I’m not your performing pony, shit-for-brains,” a frame of mind not very conducive to a lucid response.
Your problem with badchad might be a chicken and egg kind of thing. It doesn’t really matter, does it, who started being non-responsive first, you or him? He and you each have a perfect right not to respond, or not to respond quickly enough, or not to respond to the exact point that your interlocutor wanted a response to, and it’s easy to see how an innocent non-response on either of your parts could then result in the other one taking offense at being ignored and making a policy decision not to answer you until he gets the precise response from you that he wanted, an unlikely event.
Essentially, this is a sad and self-perpetuating cycle, deriving as it does from a lack of respect on everyone’s part. Once people start acting in bad faith, and presuming bad faith in the motives of others, this is inevitable, especially here in the Pit. I wish people would cut each other a little more slack, which could prevent some of the problems here, but once we start arguing for victory and not for knowledge, it gets difficult. For example, I got on What Exit’s nerves a few posts back by implying that he’d called me a jerk, when I was trying to be funny. I consider Jim a friend of mine, and was humorously implying that, for his own sake, he’d be better off to take the majority opinion as to whether I am being a jerk here, but he took me at face value, and took offense. Oh, well. We’ll patch it up, I’m sure, but if we didn’t have a history of friendly posts, I wouldnt be so sure. It’s just that easy to misread tone, and go off on somebody.
I’ve rambled on a bit, and am not sure I’ve responded to your question or to Polycarp’s, other than to assert that we avoid responding thoughtfully to each other’s questions for a variety of reasons, some good, some not so good. Evasions and avoidances have in common the notion of “Hey, don’t try to change the subject on me,” the problem being that it’s equally possible that someone IS trying to change the subject out of cowardice or malice as it is that he considers the shift to be minor, or even a legitimate variation on the same theme. We don’t all understand the proper subject in the same, or even similar, ways, and this yields further misunderstandings.
I appreciate your attempt, after so much hostility on both our parts, to engage in discussion with me, precisely as if I were a temperate and well-behaved poster.
I thought you were calling for my being banned. So you think I should be allowed to continue to speak?
Rational people cant ascribe motives to other people? Also when did I claim to be able to read minds (I’m not Polycarp)?
I’m not a troll, and I have never admitted as much. My presence on this board is to fight ignorance and in that fight I make no apologies for hurt feeling and I take no prisoners.
I ask questions that I think are relevant, and trust me, I do listen to the responses.
No worse than you, you academic smarty pants, who with all your professional training in debate still can’t hold her own with a mere amateur such as myself. Go on, why don’t you just call me a big jerk again.
Of course you know that many members of this board consider you as rude. I never said that you didn’t understand that. What I said was, in reply to pseudo, not to you, was
See the difference? I said that there are clueless people who don’t understand why they’re perceived as rude. I know you cognitively understand that people consider your approach to your posts on this board as rude, but you don’t understand why. Or you refuse to consider that they may be right and you may be wrong.
Given the evidence of our discussions there’s no reason for me worry about you kicking my ass on anything. You keep saying how easily you can do it but can’t really manage to live up to your bragging.
On the subject of your hypocrisy and why you bailed on that discussion yes. I think it’s pretty clear.
I think it does matter. He bailed on an ongoing discussion in which he was participating. His excuse now is that he didn’t like my the perfectly reasonable desire to not start a new discussion until we had finished the one we were having.
You did ramble on a bit. My question was what was your honest assessment of his tactics in this specific case?
Sure, anybody has the right to stop responding to another poster for any reason.
It’s the chadster who likes to consistently insinuate that people stop responding to him because they are either scared of of his debating prowess or that he has already kicked their ass. He’s using that same stunt with me now.
I agree. That’s been my problem with badchad. You’ve seen me give him some credit for when I thought he deserved it. I have no problem with his blunt disdain for religious beliefs. IMO he argues for his own concept of victory rather than an honest exchange of ideas and that desire for “victory” prompts his snide personal comments as well as a couple of other bad habits.
Poly’s question to you was about what he perceived as inconsistency in your judgements. I’d be interested in hearing your take on that too.
And I appreciate the tone of your response. In general I’m not a hostile kind of guy and I thought I got a little carried away with my venting. I may not agree or understand some of your posts here but hey it’s your opinion.
As I said earlier in the thread, Pseudotriton, it’s not what I have said about you in this thread which has discredited your academic claims. Your own words speak for themselves.
“It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.” - Emerson
I don’t usually agree with you but can agree with you on this. Awhile back Zoe called my background into question, despite the fact that it’s certainly somewhat rare for me to even share information about my personal background here aside from fairly non-information anectdotals. Her entire basis for believing my background was faked boiled down to the fact she’d once visited West Point so was under the impression she was more aware of what it was like to be a cadet than someone who actually was one.
Calling into question someone’s background on the basis of anything other than easily demonstrable facts is a pretty chickenshit debate tactic here, the only way you can counter it is to provide extremely personal information about yourself on a public internet forum which I’m fairly certain the majority of people aren’t comfortable doing for reasons wholly unrelated to their authenticity.
So you do believe in some things that are not falsifiable, and don’t believe in others (indeed, you think they are ridiculous) and your rebuttal of the suggestion that this is inconsistent is to repeat one of the premises… Okey dokey, whatever you say.
Arguing with you is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. This isn’t what you were arguing upthread at all. This thing about making believers inconsistent is a new strawman argument you are attempting to segue into, your first argument having gone to shit.
I take it you don’t want to answer my question.
and
Bizarre. I explain why the example chosen has the characteristics it does. You say you understand. But you ask me to explain precisely what I have just explained. Furthermore, I wasn’t asking for your understanding. I was challenging you to provide a non-offensive example that made the same point. But you’ve ducked that, I notice. Try again, or do I take it that for all your whining about contentiousness and deliberate ridicule, you can’t actually think of an example that illustrates the point without being offended by it?
So are you saying the appropriate thing for you to do is accept any non-falsifiable thing as long as you don’t know that someone made it up?
WTF are you trying to say here? It is highly telling that every time you try to give a rebuttal of the IPU point you dissolve into handwaving or gibberish or both.
I would like to see this particular thread closed. I have no objections to the other threads where you are participating. I would like to see what you could do if you did a little reading on good debate strategy and logical fallacies. (Try Googling “logical fallacies” and see what you come up with.)
That’s right! You cannot know with certainty what another person’s motives are unless you can read her or his mind! That’s why you can’t state another person’s motives as if they were fact in your argument! You and I may agree that there is a strong likelihood that a guy did something because he was insecure or because he was excited or because he was afraid – but we are not the authorities on his motives. So if we make that claim in an argument, any rational person or anyone who has studied logic is going to think “poor argument” or “flaw in his thinking.”
I think it was Daniel Monihan who said something along the lines of, “You have a right to your own opinion, but you don’t have a right to your own facts.”
You have not said, “I am a troll,” but you have admitted to doing things for some of the same reasons that a troll does them.
Just because you think they are relevant doesn’t mean that they are. The question on marriage and divorce seemed to come from left field, for example. It may be connected in your mind for some reason, but we’re not there.
I can’t “trust you” to listen. You are a human being with a lot of things being put to you at once. Some of the things that I explained to you above about not being able to know with certainty the motives of others, I have explained before. You either didn’t allow time to absorb what I was saying or you were busy constructing an argument to it in your head.
There were some things that I told you which you could not understand, but it is not your fault. It is the nature of the thing or experience that I was trying to describe; it can’t be put into words. When I tried anyway, you were quite insulting and dismissive. That was when I decided not to answer any further questions about beliefs or religious experiences. You cannot insult and listen at the same time. That doesn’t mean you have to accept or embrace what I say. You can reject it. But if you really hear me, you will be civil if I have been civil to you.
I have made no false claims and don’t consider myself an academician in its truest sense. I have not tried to debate you. I did try to answer some of your questions in Great Debates and to give you some pointers on what could improve your debating skills. But I didn’t argue religion with you. I didn’t try to convince you that I was right and you were wrong about religious matters. You didn’t even notice.
Here is how I view the exchanges we have had in the two or three threads:
Badchad: What are your beliefs, Zoe?
Zoe: These are my beliefs.
Badchad: You are wrong, stupid!
Zoe: Yes, I may be wrong. I’m okay with that.
Badchad: What did Jesus say about that?
ruber ruber: You is wrong!
Badchad: WHAT DID JESUS SAY ABOUT THAT?
Zoe: Hey, Pseudo! Something makes me think you aren’t for real!
Martin, the reasons that I don’t believe that you attended West Point have nothing to do with my visit there. There are several things. The least of these is that you didn’t recognize my last name.
It is simple to answer a few questions to indicate that you are familiar with West Point and the routines, but I didn’t ask you to do that. Nor did I ask you to reveal any personal information.
I think that you may want to let sleeping dogs lie on this one, Martin.