I can certainly see that side of it, but kleinbl00 and I have a long history of not seeing eye-to-eye, first on reddit and now here, and a lot of it stems from the fact that he doesn't think he should give an anonymous user on the internet the common decency of not talking down to them like they're a fucking retard. He wrote a whole post about it on reddit about how everyone else is just words on the screen to him and he has better shit to do than care about random internet people etc. Every time I try to debate something with him he starts insulting my intelligence or arguing semantics. Edit: Found it. http://www.reddit.com/r/kleinbl00/comments/e59s8/on_aggressi...
Yeah, I'm sympathetic to this. Thoughtful conversation should, I think, include the assumption that the people you're debating with are intelligent and well-meaning. If I ever think that's not true I just stop bothering to argue. Life's too short. There are times when I'm overcome by frustration, when it seems nobody understands what I'm trying to say. When that happens, I leave the conversation until I get over it. (Which might be a long time.) All this is just corollary to, "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing." The way I interpret that, disagreement is ok, but snappishness is not. It requires a certain discipline, a willingness to forget past conversations and start afresh. Otherwise you can get caught in a bad dynamic that's not useful to anyone. (Some married couples I know have that problem.) Or you end up taking out past frustrations on unlucky bystanders. Thoughts, kleinbl00? Can't we all just get along? :) If you think a conversation is pointless, why spend the energy to bother saying so?