Proverbs 9:9-10 describes your response to my posts last night:
Good for you, gobucks, because I wasn't gentle. One of my strongest character flaws is that I am honest to a fault. The truth is so important to me that I sometimes forget to speak it in love. Love takes more time; getting straight to the point is not preferable to gentleness. I am capable of gentleness, when I am willing to take the time. This is my way of saying that I, too, am capable of learning from rebuke.
My initial thought is that from a purely debate POV, you outclass me, evidently, and I'm not too pig-headed to concede that.
I gave no thought to out-classing you, only to dissecting what you had said and responding to it frame by frame so that I could convey to you why it was that you were failing to connect with me. You asked me to do it. It is supremely important to me that when I convey a thought in writing I express it in such a way that the reader clearly understands my point. I do not want to be misinterpreted. I believe in truth, and that truth can be conveyed with words, because words have meaning. There is no one-upmanship in this; it is to our mutual benefit to communicate well.
OTOH, I'm not, for some reason (other than lunacy ... for if I'm a lunatic, then you must be thinking roughly 70 percent of FREEPERS have no brain), getting my own point across at all. So, I'm going to think about this too.
Without trying to be priggish or proud, let me suggest that the above thoughts might have been better conveyed with the following sentence structure:
My reply:
A) I can only respond to what you have written. Words have meaning. It is helpful to use simple sentence structure, to double-check word meanings using a dictionary, and to support one's theories with fact and example. It is also helpful to stick to one point (usually the main thrust of the thread), making that the center of your argument to which you continually return.
B) I never said you were a lunatic. I stridently presented a case that what you were posting was lunacy. You yourself used the term "mental poison" when speaking to another FReeper. While the word I used, lunacy, implies illogical thought processes without guilt, the expression you chose, mental poison, implies intentional corruption of otherwise wholesome thought processes. I never once assumed you were a lunatic: it was beyond me to try to discover what your motives were, or what your excuse was, for posting the way you did, for making arguments in the way you did.
By bringing to the table a suggestion that I "must" be thinking of "70 percent of FReepers" a certain way, in this case as having "no brain," you are misdirecting the conversation by an accusation that is unfounded in truth. What I thought about any other FReepers was already posted in Answer A, and could be addressed quote by quote and line by line. If I were of the sort to do so, I might have responded to this accusation by saying, "Where did I say that I think 70 percent of FReepers have no brain?" You would have been hard-pressed to find such a quote, thus proving the accusation false and discrediting the rest of your argument, and the meat of our conversation would have been set aside for a side-dish of bitter herbs.
There is an Answer D waiting in the wings yet, though you have already thanked me for it. Perhaps you were thanking me for holding it in abeyance? ( ;