--- In [email protected], Bronte Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I wrote this and a bunch of other posts today which apparently got lost in cyber space. I'm asking Rick to tell me what's wrong.
BTW, some of the originals are now showing up along with your forwards, so perhaps they're just being delayed. It does happen from time to time. Have you tried posting from the Web site rather than by email? Such posts rarely seem to get delayed. <snip> > I used to be in a debate club in high school. People battled each other on issues just for the fun of sharpening their intellects. Some battled, I'm sure, for the sake of beating others, to put other people down. But some of us just enjoyed the fencing for its own sake. Like athletes enjoy meets. You've got your athletes who hate the other team and really want to make them look stupid. But mostly they're guys who enjoy competition because it sharpens their own abilities. Their efforts to rile up the opponent are made in the spirit of starting a contest for fun. Thanks for making this point; it's one I've tried to make here before. There are one or two people here who view the debating impulse as somehow malign, as a "bid for attention," as a response to a perceived "attack on one's self," rather than, as you say, a matter of starting a contest for the fun of sharpening one's intellect (and, I would add, refining one's positions). Oddly enough, yesterday I was copy editing a piece on how to handle flaming on a blog. The author observed: "Flaming can...take on the quality of a ritual battle, of sport. Participants try out different rhetorical tricks, looking for inconsistencies in their opponent's arguments, bringing genuine research and logic to their own arguments, conceding points when necessary, praising impressive tactical moves of their opponents, regarding it all with amused detachment, as a game, like verbal jousting." He's really talking about turning flaming into an actual debate rather than just an exchange of ad hominem insults. But it's a nice description of what debate can be at its best (although I'd say "tactics" rather than "tricks"). An intellectually honest debate has the quality of *dialectic*, whose ultimate goal is resolution of opposing viewpoints. Even when resolution is not achieved (which is most of the time), dialectic can make the real nature of a disagreement a lot clearer than it was to start with; and often it turns out that the disagreement was significantly narrower than it appeared in the beginning. <snip> > "And because you are not smart enough" is the part that really hurts, whether it's said or implied. Whenever a debate gets personal - - with the other person becoming the subject of the discussion instead of the topic itself -- the debaters skate onto thin ice and an insult is likely to happen. I don't find such insults hurtful, actually, unless they're coming from someone I respect, but such a person would be unlikely to indulge in insult in the first place. Insults are mostly an expression of the *insulter's* feelings, after all, so why should they be taken personally?
