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Originally Posted by filtherton
Though it is interesting to note that your opening question exemplifies the type of debating style I'm attempting to avoid, in that you're clearly feigning ignorance with a question and your question is phrased in such a way so as to betray your contempt for whatever you're pretending to be ignorant about.
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Sure, I'll cop to an instance of annoying style there. I do indeed have contempt for a style that responds to "Uh, that very thread counters your criticism" with "That's not the only thread that supports my criticism!"
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The thread I abandoned wasn't the our first conversation. We have a rich tradition of me saying something, you pretending like you don't understand what I'm saying so that you can ask a question about it. Then when I answer your question, you just respond with another question, ad infinitum, until I stop responding.
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Nah, excepting that one snipe above, I can't remember an exchange between us where that was the case. It's not a matter of pretending, it's a matter of getting your unstated assumptions, headwork, and leaps into the open. When, for instance, you call those gay marriage falsehoods 'convenient', you're making an implicit claim as to whether opponents in general earnestly believed those falsehoods. And you're making that claim without being bold enough to outright say it, detail it, and defend it.
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The reason I abandoned the above-mentioned thread is that it finally dawned on me that there isn't any point in attempting to have a discussion when my every response is going to be met with some form of "but why?"
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I'll point out again that my posts in that thread weren't exactly as homogenous as you portray. Consider that maybe the other posters were doing something that you weren't.
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And you're deluding yourself if you think you can pass off your questions as some sort of honest effort to get beyond some sort of lack of clarity on my part. The questions you frequently ask often drip with the kind of derision that would be completely out of place if all you were trying to do was understand my perspective.
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You take issue with derision now? (Crap, did it again.)
It's entirely possible that you have some new angle on an issue that I hadn't yet considered and it would
honestly be easier to see such an angle if you weren't so averse to my questions. In the interim, though, apparently shallow thinking phrased in shallow ways will tend to strike me as shallow. And here's a personal stake for that last issue: your shallow statement amounted to the idea that many of my friends and family are bigots, with all the ugly things that term connotes.
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Beyond that, your questions are typically leading, which to me means you think you already know the answer to them and are asking them to point the conversation in a particular direction.
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Yes, that direction is the unstated - possibly unexamined - parts of your argument.
I won't complain if the light is shone on mine.
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Now, I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. You're clearly intelligent, passionate and thoughtful. I'm just trying to explain to you why I'm not particularly inclined to engage you in message board discussions.
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I'm not all that hurt by an attempt to rationalize a dodge via deflection - just annoyed.