The fuel to debate, how do you get it?
 

I find myself less and less inclined to write out long winded responses to topics asserting why something is wrong or right. Typically heated topics which deal with politics, religion, sexuality, science, or arts just seem to sinking beneath me.

I used to CARE about debating my perception on issues, but I'm finding myself just backing off everything now. There are a number of threads I could participate in on this forum, a lot of them where people will bust out references and turn a small topic in to a 5 page rant on the virtues of XYZ and the evils of ABC. I guess after being online for so long, since I was 16 or so, since IRC was king, since email was a "novelty"... You just start to get tired of the "trend" of human interaction. you start to feel like it's all an elaborate dance and it becomes predictable. Society itself, a social construct, has rules, and it just seems so easy to dance around them and see through them for what they are.

I mean it feels like I've just learned to accept the fact that it doesn't matter what anyone else feels or thinks about something, if it matters to me, it will continue to do so, and if it doesn't it will continue to not matter to me.

I remember early in my childhood having my mother and grandmother trying to preach to me the "God is good" bit, having me try to believe in religion, and I did a bit of my own digging around, asking around, talking to people and eventually gaining access to theology type reading materials coupled with something as simple as a history book which just led me to my own particular realistic perspective on reality.

Religion used to be a huge topic for me, but it's such a non issue to me now, because i'm convinced that devoting seconds of my mortality, my brain cycles, to a subject that has the world chasing it's own tail looking for the meaning of life yet never finding the answer is a waste. I made the same conclusion when I quit MMO's and honestly, I just am at the point where I don't even think about it anymore. Religion, Politics, hot topics are all just reaching a freezing point to me now. I don't care.

more accurately, I may care, I just don't care enough to try to convince you to see my point of view on the matter, maybe i'm just too stuck up to think I could find common ground with anyone on any subject any more.

:shakehead:

I started a thread in tilted music and it pretty much went as expected. It wasn't so much that I was serious in my inquiry, I knew inserting a negative descriptor of a popular genre I just don't care about would cause people to get defensive. People fell all over themselves to voice their views and be like "no no, it's like THIS, not like THAT" and this is just why I just don't care.

To me, everything is relative to me, I am the center of my own universe, and a lot of people function in the same matter merely by proxy of being in a society that functions as such. You go to work to make your money to take care of your needs, and if you say you're taking care of a child or a family, it's still your needs isn't it?

I dunno. I think maybe the tone of this thread may just spark even more disinterest from whatever responses people decide to drop in here. I'm not really in the mood to write any more.

I don't know what you expect from this thread; I don't even know if you expect anything from it, by the sound of it. But what the hell....

Maybe you should consider re-evaluating your core values. Maybe you need to rethink how you engage on these topics. So, in short, maybe it's about what you think, and how you communicate it.

If you truly believe that religion and politics don't matter to you anymore, then you might be reaching a point where you need to rethink everything. Ask yourself the questions that many artists (and others, I'm sure) ask of themselves when considering why they do what they do: Is the future at risk? What should/can I do in response?

most arguments that center on evaluations good/bad turn into meta-arguments soon enough--meta-arguments are about the criteria that shape arguments. it may not be particularly interesting to know that x find phenomenon 1 to be icky or interesting, but it can be interesting to find out WHY they think as they do.

the difficulty in getting interesting meta-arguments to happen is one of the many frustrations a messageboard brings with it. i think it follows from the medium itself (these little boxes) and from when and how they are used (e.g. if you steal time from your day gig to post stuff, you're probably going to be inclined to just state things. if you have a more amorphous schedule, then you might find this mode tiresome.) because a messageboard give you as a reader no idea at all of how folk use them and only shows the results of their usage, it flattens responses. sooner or later, you either adjust to this limitation or you stop playing.

in 3-d i tend to be quite interested in trying to figure out how other folk process information, how they think, why they operate as they do---which means that there is an extent to which i sometimes treat social interactions as little ethnographic experiments. i dont know if this is a good thing or not--but it's one of the outcomes of being a professional generator of abstractions, a kind of occupational hazard.

if you draw a box around these experiments and call it "research" then of course it acquires a degree of legitimacy--but if you do it while the person you are hanging out with over a beer in a publick house, the outcomes can go otherwise. and my grad school career demonstrated to me that calling drinking "research" is a kind problematic move.

anyway, i suppose the trick is to remember that people really like best situations in which they get to talk about themselves and are flattered by someone appearing to be interested and don't particularly care about why that interest might be there.

on the other hand, the only sense you really get of how you think that is not covered over with projections (because these pathways are your pathways and so are not present to you as pathways) is to bounce off other people. so all of this is probably reciprocal.
i like to pretend to myself that it is at any rate.
i work on the assumption that it is.
that way, i dont feel like an asshole.
i might in fact be an asshole, i just prefer to think that i am not one.
like anyone, i guess.

I think every philosophizing person goes through a phase where they feel compelled to air their opinions and to jab at the weaknesses of alternate viewpoints. I crossed a threshold where I realized that a person will simply believe X or believe Y, and strenuous debate will do little to change their perspective -- and will probably just incite anger and frustration.

And the thing about the Internet is that there's a constant influx of people with ideas that have not yet matured. You can explain to them the rest of the details, but it really won't click until they tackle the reading material for themselves. Which they might never do anyway. In the long run, it's simply a lot more pleasant to shrug at malformed or outlandish ideas, as long as they aren't inflicting unnecessary pain. So I mostly only debate against ideas that threaten what I view to be positive living.

Try looking at it from a different perspective. Don't make it a debate, make it a discussion. Debating is for lawyers, and they burn out on it even when they ARE getting paid. You're not going to change anyone's mind about religion, and politics is nearly religion. What is it that you're trying to get out of your participation? Figure that out and what you should do will come naturally.

Excellent topic. Let me start with:

I've got the power of a thousand suns fueling my debating capability.

But does it fill a Trojan Magnum?

I use 'em for ski hats.