To a bcc'd correspondent who doesn't understand the "animosity" I receive over what he calls "arcane differences":
I've been debating online since 1988, and I dare say I've gotten pretty good at it. My extensive experience suggests that the more accustomed an Internet debater is to being right, the more it tests his character when he is shown to be wrong. (Yes, I've been shown to be wrong before.) I have a style of precision and thoroughness and unflinching persistence that such people sometimes take as an excuse to project onto me the most uncharitable available interpretation of anything I say. In particular, they seem to consider it a character flaw for me to point out where my arguments are unanswered -- as if I'm dancing in the end zone in a zero-sum game of amusement, rather than participating in a positive-sum communal effort by which we're all ostensibly trying to either improve or validate our individual worldviews. Meanwhile, bystanders understandably lack the interest or motivation in wading through the "arcane differences" to see who's right, and so if I dare to defend myself from a deliberate falsehood by documenting it to be such, then all they tend to see is that I'm using the word "liar" the way other people might use the word "asshole", and conclude incorrectly that I'm hardly any cleaner than the person throwing mud at me. Then there's Brian Miller. In my thirty years of online debating, I've never met anyone as intelligent as he who nevertheless is so obviously willing and gleefully eager to repeat falsehoods about people even after they've been demonstrated and protested to be such. He seems to have made some sort of calculation that his chosen ends justify such despicable means. He apparently doesn't care if his means are publicly exposed, perhaps because he (correctly) estimates that nobody other than his victim has sufficient interest in assessing the details of the case against him. That is, he lies about people precisely because he knows he can get away with it. His ethics seem to be that the immorality of an act of his is strictly bounded by the blowback he suffers from it, and so lying about someone is moral if it serves the greater good of decreasing support for that person. He doesn't bother defending himself against the specifics of the case against him, because such a defense is not in the Big Lie playbook. I've been told that Lenin counseled comrades to always attack if they ever have the urge to defend, and Miller has taken this advice to heart. This is of course not to say that Miller is purely evil or congenitally unable to tell the truth; far from it. It's only his overall virtue and general insightfulness that lets him rationalize -- and get away with -- recreationally lying in plain sight. P.S. No discussion by me of Internet flaming would be complete without repeating the following, which I wrote long ago. Flame wars are fueled almost entirely by two related practices: strawmen and fallacies of the excluded middle. One should always ask oneself: 1. Am I accurately characterizing my opponent's position, e.g. by quoting his exact words? 2. Am I fallaciously assuming that there can be no position between mine and the extreme opposite position? If any two people think they can keep a flame war going without using either of these two practices, I'd like to see them try.
