From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu Jun 12 2003 - 11:45:07 MDT
Ron writes:
> Thank you, someone should also have asked in the begining if that was
> the beginning of the discussion. To the best of my memory neither you nor
> Harvey have ever found the beginning. I believe Amara presented the news article
> as evidence she had found to support a discussion she and I had as much as a
> month or two ago.
Since you said you were not able to access the archives of the posts
in question, I sent you a copy in private email. I hope you will soon
provide either evidence of what you claimed, "Amara accused the US of
'carpet bombing' with cluster bombs", or an apology.
> Last, while you two young lads were leaping so quickly to that ladies
> defense you might have noticed that she never complained about me
> misrepresenting her.
We are all harmed by misrepresentation. It hurts the quality of the
dialog here on this list. Harvey and I have as much right to complain
about it as anyone. You will notice that I also complained that Harvey
was wrong to characterize your comments as dishonest.
I should make clear that this thread is far from the only one where these
kinds of tactics are being used. In fact, I see the quality of almost all
of our political discussions as being atrocious, full of name-calling and
rhetorical trickery. Complaining about all of them would be a full time
job, which I am not willing to take on.
I'm not sure what to do about it. I've made occasional comments in an
attempt to encourage people to back off from their knee-jerk ideological
battles and try to analyze things more objectively - for example,
make a sincere attempt to make the best case you can for the side you
disagree with. I've also talked about the nature of disagreement, facts
versus values - but most of the political threads are so mangled by the
name-calling and ideological defensiveness that it is almost impossible
to identify a single point of factual disagreement!
On this list we claim to be willing to explore novel technologies. Yet we
engage in exactly the same styles of pointless rhetorical battling that
you can find in any other forum on the net. What is Extropian about how
we handle political disagreements? Nothing. We just yell at each other.
Hal
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