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Originally Posted by Ustwo
There is a line between spam and supporting your argument. Often I can not tell the link between what host pastes and what he is talking about. This causes me to often just ignore his posts which is unfortunet but we can only spend so much time seperating the wheat from the chaff. I would much rather talk about his views then about the mountain of articles he posts.
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There is a line, and as soon as host starts linking articles about penis enlargement he will have crossed it. Otherwise, it seems rather lazy to me to engage in a discussion without the willingness to actually understand the bases of your fellow member's position.
It isn't that difficult to compare someone's interpretation of a news article with the actual article, especially when that article is right in front of you. If you can't find a link between the two, it is generally more helpful to say so and hope for some sort of elaboration from the person in question, than to just skip the post and pretend it was irrelevant. It seems especially backwards, to me, to attempt to mock someone for actually bringing data to an exchange of ideas. I suppose it just serves as a reflection of the overall intellectual laziness of my fellow americans who've been spoon fed empty, superficial garbage by the corporations that control american mainstream culture since conception.
Such mockery does serve to separate the wheat from the chaff though, because you can tell how committed someone is to having a meaningful discussion by their willingness to deal with the facts at hand. Participating in discussions based on factually verifiable information can take considerable intellectual time and effort, two things that are increasingly in short supply when it comes to the part played in american politics by the average american. It is much easier to just fire off some loosely relevant, partisan party-echoing paragraph than it is to formulate your own ideas by paying attention to what is actually going on. Unfortunately, it is also far less useful in terms of actually exchanging ideas or learning anything.