sabotabby | (Reply)

From:

It's all "I get it! You get it? He so doesn't get it!" At first I thought this was amusing shorthand. And, well, in some ways it of course is.

Well, here's the thing. It is shorthand. I have a life, and a job that pretty much takes all of my patience, so I don't have time for flamewars on the internets like I used to. Not to mention that my belief that you can change irrational people's minds through rational discourse has been slowly eroded by trying it, time and again.

You make a metric fuckton of assumptions, as usual. The first is that my initial, strongly-held positions were not derived from some intellectual process (being a woman, I suppose my beliefs travel straight from my jerking knee to my bleeding heart to my big Jewish mouth). Like the evangelical who assumes that atheists must never have heard of the Christian God, you assume that I arrive at positions without examining the other side. When, in fact, most of the media I consume reflects opinions that run opposite to my own.

The moderate mainstream likes to assume that it's more rational than either extreme, when, in fact, it is simply more indecisive. Not to mention that on the most polarizing social issues (abortion, homosexuality, and so on), there can be no moderate position.

You label such thinking as characteristic of investigative reporters. I don't think I mind the label.

You should, particularly if you've read the article I lined to. He's not referring to Woodward and Bernstein here. He's talking about reporters who, rather than examine and expose an obvious lie (in this case, that the U.S. is headed towards totalitarian socialism), report on the form of a political argument to avoid offending anyone or being accused of impartiality. Which is what you do, minus the fear of offense, when you view internet arguments as a game of form and strategy. (You're no more rational than I am; you have not brought evidence or logic into arguments. Your trolling amounts to a little boy putting a girl's pigtails in the inkwell. You're also not very good at accomplishing what you claim to be setting out to do, since you never win.)

I leave you with a cartoon, which is only appropriate, since this post started with one.