I don't understand why you haven't moved on to insult people you believe to be more on your intellectual level.It's because you NEED me here. Your (yours, Ian's, others) thinking skills (even in the area of conservative thought, which is a perfectly legitimate application of neuronal activity, btw), are so rudimentary it's quite distressing.
You're all sufferers of the Web's most pervasive problem: people who honestly believe they legitimately defend their political, social and religious positions by saying "I
feel that way" or (worse yet!) by citing an obscure blog-rant by some shmuck who feels the same way they do: they find commiseration with their feelings, and believe that's equivalent (or should be) to the validation of their arguments.
You see, I actually don't mind being beaten in an argument. Sure it's brief sting to the most selfish part of the ego; but most of my ego is built on the bulletproof ideal that knowledge is all we humans have, ultimately. Thereby, I understand that by
losing an argument to an opponent with superior knowledge I'm actually winning in a different sense - because afterward I know what my opponent knows, and so my knowledge has been increased.
It's like chess: no one ever learned anything about chess by beating their opponent: the very fact that you won (barring a major blunder by your adversay) shows that you understand more about the game than he does. Paradoxically, only when you lose at chess do you gain practical opportunity to further your knowledge and understanding about the game.
An opponent with superior understanding
teaches you whether he wants to or not; he
reveals portions of his understanding as you play together. All you have to do to make those revelations your own is thoroughly analyze the game after defeat - learn to recognize those areas where his plans were obviously not
just thwarting your own but doing so
because he saw more clearly into the position than you did; at leisure, you try to see through his eyes, and pick out the clues in your play that showed him what you were up to even though you thought you were being sly; once you've done that, you've made his knowledge your own.
The same applies to contests of rational argument. (Not very surprising, since chess is the most rational of games.) If you beat an opponent through superior argumentation grounded in superior knowledge, how has your knowledge been increased or improved? It hasn't. QED. You can only learn from a debate opponent by losing to him.
Oh, I see your thoughts at this point: "Why are you staying here then, where your vast knowledge must be suffocating in the vacuum of so much inferiority?" (See, I can be sarcastic about it, too.
)
The easy answer is that I enjoy turning the intellectual worlds of folks like you upside-down - rubbing your noses in your own complacency (Bad! Bad!), so that one day you'll grow up to become mentally productive members of society instead of ignorant internet trailer-trash.
You have repeatedly explained to us that we are not your equals.That's only because none of you has proved yourself my equal yet. ...I HAVE given you numerous opportunities to try. Why haven't you availed yourself of them? Do you enjoy being intellectually dominated? Go back and look carefully at my posts, MO: most of the nasty things I've said have come as a direct consequence of stupid remarks and baseless claims made by
you and the others I've debated here. I've tossed the occasional gratuitous bomb, but you
et al have handed me the majority of the ammunition I've used. You just didn't KNOW at the time that you were handing me ammunition.
You probably were stung nastily by my little "courtroom drama" a few days ago (I noticed you never replied to it): but YOU were the one who made the idiotic claim that the 10 Commandments are the foundation of American law. I'm sure you actually, honestly, believe that. But it's just not true, as I demonstrated. The only principles in American law common to the 10Cs are laws governing adultery, theft, and murder - actions against which there have been codified laws since before the time the Hebrews were still slaves under the Egyptian lash! The other 7 (!) Commandments have no representation whatever in American law. There used to be laws regarding the Sabbath (businesses couldn't be open, people weren't allowed to drink, etc.) but biblical-based "blue laws" have fallen like bricks everywhere they've been challenged. There were at one time "tests" requiring a person be a Christian before being allowed to hold public office (similar to laws that once required someone to prove they were 'white' before being allowed to vote): those laws no longer exist; they were declared unconstitutional.
So you made a massively ignorant claim - and I just chose a particularly ridiculing vehicle to parade its massive ignorance to other readers. ...You handed me the very ammunition I used against you. I told you openly: if you climb unprepared into the ring with me, I'm going to humiliate you. I didn't lie. An unprepared opponent is worthy of no respect; the fact that they come unprepared is an insult by itself. And when they come blustering in their ignorance and unpreparedness, I open the flamethrowers to "full." You haven't even seen that happen yet.
If you say you are a genius, fine, I'll believe you.The funny thing is, you concede a thing that's utterly irrelevant.
Having gone back over this thread it would seem that you're mostly talking to yourself. You will maniacally argue the most benign point until you're blue in the face.Sometimes the most important concepts are concealed in the most innocuous language. ...Do you have a specific example in mind?
It struck me that this thread lends some credibility to the claim that there is a fine line between genius and insanity.Aww, and up to this point you'd been doing so well. And now, the veiled insult. I'll overlook it because you're making discernible progress.
I don't wish to engage you in any point by point refutations of what you say.Why not? That's what real refutations are made of - point-by-point presentations, each point (if they are sound ones) another nail in the opponent's intellectual coffin. I suppose you'd rather continue "feeling" the rightness of your positions? That's very ironic and funny, you know: conservatives are forever complaining that people on the left believe something is right when it "feels" right, implying that conservatives themselves operate mostly on rational thinking. But where the rubber meets the road, conservatives are no more analytical than most liberals: nearly all of you are nauseatingly "touchy-feely" when it comes to your own positions; nearly none of you could assemble a logic-based argument on
anything if your little touchy-feely lives depended on it. From where I sit, most of you - liberal and conservative alike - are both pitiful and pitiable from an intellectual perspective.
Frankly, it's like watching a movie in which you don't identify with any of the characters, hero or villain, so you just change the channel. Your pompous attitude has made me indifferent to you and your posts.The very fact you responded here puts the lie to those words.
You don't like me, that's true; but I've also been quite a novelty here: a liberal who embraces some conservative views (because, after analysis, they make a superior choice to the alternative); a liberal who's not philosophically committed to
liberalism; a liberal who not only vehemently but nastily rejects all "touchy-feely" approaches to issues; a liberal who lives and dies by the logicality and rationality of his positions and arguments; a liberal who openly despises the Liberal Fringe as much as he despises the Conservative Fringe; a liberal who can 'dish it out' on a level that leaves the opposition helpless to respond except through tucked-tail full-scale retreats involving invective or arch dismissal (mere admissions of inadequacy); a liberal with the ability to expose the smallest weakness in an argument and turn it into a complete refutation; a liberal who provokes proponents of stupid arguments to supply the very means by which their arguments are subsequently destroyed; a liberal who's as arrogant as any neoconservative anywhere - but with better reason for being arrogant....
That's what makes me novel in a place like this and most everywhere I go; and that's why I'm feared and disliked by empty-headed arrogant dorks who
don't have what it takes to back up their arrogance, and why I'm actually respected and even liked by my intellectual peers, whether they're conservative or liberal; because I'm hard but fair - able to immediately admit error when wrong, and able to quickly alter positions when they
should be altered.
