Shodan did not participate in the thread and I was explaining the situation to him.
If you take it to an extreme, I would close your threads or warn you for refusing to cite your arguments, so I am glad you won’t do that again. But I am trying to tell you that your view of “debating unfairly” was skewed. It’s not just that you overused the common knowledge claim, it’s that you were hostile to almost everyone who requested a cite and kept calling them “obstructionists” when they would not take your statements at face value. If you take that attitude into other threads, they will become as unproductive as the last few pages of the gay marriage thread.
I am not interested in resuming the debate, and we’re in the wrong forum for it. I am trying to make clear to you what some of the problems were in that thread.
I suggested that you ask others as a good faith effort that you really do not know. There are legitimately people who do not know something because they just missed it, but that does not make their lack of knowledge the standard. I also said I would take your word for it.
We can have civil discourse or not, that is what my issue is about.
NOW you claim knowing about divorce rates, and you or anyone else could have helped derail five to ten pages of nonsense by at least partial conceding that some of what I said was known by almost everyone and THEN asking me for cites to fill the gaps, but that wouldn’t have helped your position in the debate, and that’s why no one said, “It’s true, we do all know about some of this at least.” but if a bunch of nonsense is preferable…
And therefore it is perfectly reasonable to pick a claim where I abused and admitted abusing the claim of common knowledge. My argument is not that common knowledge is a valid response to anything at all. You could have easily picked rising divorce rates as the sample.
That was after complaints were made and IT SEEMED, since the behavior was getting repeated, nothing was done. Its not talking to the abusers I will try to avoid, but I am not promising that there will not be times to legitimately claim a cite is not needed. But if I do a good job selecting who I debate with, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Then let’s drop the night before last instead of trying to prove how unreasonable I was. I admitted getting to that point. Please. You do accept good faith apologies, right?
And I would define blue if the debate were directly relevant to exactly what blue is, but not if its obstructionist like in “prove the sky is blue.”
The definition of love is a seriously interesting question. Perhaps a thread on it would be fun.
“The condition in which someone else’s happiness comes before your own,” might describe a lot of things, and might leave part of a necessary quality of love out. Plenty of people claim love but then act selfishly, and given the subjective nature of the question…
But I am not trying to hijack either organically or non-organically, so I will save it for an appropriate time.
David42, I accept your apology. The problem is that I don’t think you understand what happened in the thread. In Great Debates, you are expected to produce cites to support your arguments. It’s the defining characteristic of the forum. It’s true that people can go overboard with it, but there were few or no excessive requests for cites in that thread.
In the future, I don’t think you should try this tactic again. In the best case, it’s a waste of time that is easily circumvented by lying, so it’s not going to be effective anyway.
At least one poster in the thread did concede that you were right about divorce rates going up since the advent of no-fault divorces - he said it was obvious that making divorce easier would make divorces more common. That would have been an opportune time to post your cite if you had one. It would have saved everyone a lot of time and it would have made your argument look much stronger.
If you read this line, you will see you made a much larger claim than the one about no-fault divorces: “Boatloads of studies show that every time we change marriage a little bit divorce rates go up.” People were not denying the point about no-fault divorce. You made a bigger claim than that, and people here read closely. I don’t think you acknowledged that the no-fault divorce claim only partially supported this contention.
The bottom line is that if someone asks you to cite an argument, the right thing to do is almost always to just post the cite. Sometimes people get unreasonable, but if you comply with the reasonable requests, it will become clear when people are not being reasonable and it won’t hurt your argument.
Opinions and anecdotes are all well and good, but they are not facts.
For instance, I got pregnant three times in two years. Using four different types of birth control (I used contraceptive foam and condoms together, her name is Lisa). My sister got pregnant twice, on two different kinds of birth control. My aunts and grandmother also had birth control failures. Does this mean that birth control frequently fails, in the general population? No, it just means that women in my mother’s side of the family tend to get pregnant easily. This wasn’t all user error, as with each woman, at least one pregnancy happened when an IUD was in place. And yes, my grandmother was a human beta tester of IUDs. For most women, birth control is much more reliable.
But if you listened to the anecdotes around the kitchen table, you’d think that the various methods of birth control were much less effective.
So, when asked for a cite, it’s up to the person making the claim to provide a link to FACTS.
In my case, at least, I’m not easy. Hell, I’ve been married for 34 years now. I’ve had sex with exactly two men in my lifetime…and I was a teenager in the 70s. It’s not like my husband and I go at it like bunnies, either. Knowing my female relatives, well, ONE aunt is (or rather was) easy. The rest of us are faithful, as far as I know.
The problem isn’t that people were demanding cites for common knowledge, it’s that what David42 was presenting as common knowledge–that gays can’t have children–isn’t common knowledge. In fact it’s false. Gays have kids all the time: through adoption, surrogacy, etc. At best I think he was disingenuously trying to conflate the fact that gays can’t have kids through fucking each other with their ability to have children at all. But no one was argung that a same sex sex act could produce a fetus.
And that’s part of what going for cites is for,- what one may think is common knowledge often is neither common nor knowledge. The ignorance you fight may be your own. If you’re not even open to the possibility, then you’re not debating, you’re just ranting.
I’d still like to see what his evidence is that the Bible relates factual history more than occasionally.
He didn’t say gays couldn’t have kids – he was saying that “gay community” was encouraging adoption for political reasons. Not because, you know, they wanted to be parents.
You may be right, I couldn’t stomach reading that whole thread in detail. But if you are that makes his complaint even more wrongheaded. What you just posted isn’t common knowledge at all. In fact it’s conspiracy theory.
Oddly, he actually did say gays couldn’t have kids. When pressed, he then qualified that they could only have kids “artificially”, so that it didn’t count.