Originally posted by Bashar Teg
my reply would be that i do not owe everyone's every horseshit argument a rebuttal. it would be one thing if we were engaged in a debate and i copped out, but that's not what happened here.so really what we have is not a problem of dialogue, but rather a false sense of personal entitlement courtesy of our fallen SW clan brother.
I mean, sure, you obviously don't have to provide a detailed response to every single argument that's thrown your way. But let's not pretend that this interaction has been the outlier: there's a very specific group here that is very palpably unwilling to engage in good faith, substantive discussion, and you're deluding yourself if you think otherwise.
If I may be blunt and a little self-aggrandizing for just a second, nobody would legitimately accuse me of being bad at making arguments or uninformed about politics/policymaking/etc. If I'm below your threshold for "worth talking politics with", you have a pretty absurdly high threshold. Yet I've basically never successfully engaged you or Putinbot1 in a conversation on the matter...and I'm (moderately) left wing! Putinbot treats me as though I were a right winger because I'm from the Star Wars forums and, more importantly, I dare to disagree with him on anything.
I think I know what you're thinking when you troll: that you know the other side is wrong because of <insert point here>. But you never bother to get those ideas tested against competition, because on the issues where we disagree I'll almost guarantee you that I've thought of all of the arguments you think are killing shots - probably because I may have found them convincing before myself.
If you're only here to troll and are self-aware of that fact, then sure, go ahead. But if a part of you thinks otherwise, it's not doing a good job of it.