Debate vs. Abuse at Conniptions

Posted on May 2, 2003 in Crosstalk InterNet Debates

I got called a “conservative” over at ConNiPtioN:

It happened during a discussion about Rob getting a reply to a nasty piece called “You Know You’re A Liberal” axed. (It was the antithesis: “You Know You’re A Conservative”.)

I think it was the line where I said “I’d rather talk about my differences with ~you~ because there’s no working things out with the likes of the wRong — they delude themselves that everyone is like them and they can’t fathom diversity” that got Greg Anderson confused. He wrote:

I hope to speak with you sometime if you’re one of the few conservatives/republicans that actually likes to debate points. I go to a few places of which Yahoo is only one where if a conservative doesn’t like your point they say how stupid it is without ever responding to why it’s stupid. That always comes off to me like they don’t want to respond to your point because you made a good one so they just say it made no sense and name call.

Greg’s right about the character of those pseudo-conservatives (I use this technically because they want to conserve nothing — not our resources, not our civil liberties, not our money, not our people) and ConNiPtioNs is a place where I have stood up and said just that.

In a follow up response to a comment by Rob where he characterizes what I would call abuse as “a little healthy debate”, I pointed out that the exchange was “no debate…, no investigation of ideas, just a volley of abuse going both ways.

For me, debate means a joint investigation into the truth. It doesn’t mean continually having to endure attacks, put downs, or people who only come to attack me. I have discussions with friends who hold different views from me all the time.

I made a personal decision to move away from engagements with obsessed conservatives because I really don’t care what they think about my pacifism and social consciousness. It isn’t debate, it’s them attacking me and them saying “No, you’re wrong” ad nauseum. They don’t involve themselves in any other part of my life, except to take cheap shots.

Another participant, Timothy Butler, pointed out that people needed to understand that Rush Limbaugh was largely an entertainer. He’s right. Pseudo-conservatives strive first for the entertainment value before the substance. They say outrageous things to make people mad. These are the kind of people who put signs on your butt that say “Kick me” or who drop banana peels in your path or who pick the wings off of flies or blow up frogs for the Death Star special effect. It’s not debate that they are after, but anti-intellectual thrills.

There’s nothing in the Bill of Rights that says that I must agree to be every kook’s plaything. I reserve my faculties for intelligent discussion and fact-finding to strengthen and refine my own views, not for walking back and forth like a duck at a carnival shooting gallery. It’s more fruitful to direct criticisms at the Left and the Middle than to even blink an eye at the wRong, except to warn these others of the danger the wRong presents to Americans today.