The trend of refusing to debate.

[Puzzlesocks]

The dishonesty was you misrepresenting your own source.

You quoted it, and then literally argued things it did not say and does not support.

I'm ignoring the rest, because you're just demanding I accept untruths as truth. They're not. You're making up a bunch of horseshit and engaging in transphobic posting, to boot.

It would be nice if you read the complete post instead of focusing on trigger words and ignoring the rest, which again, was the entire point of this topic. You seem to think it has some sort of conspiracy behind it, but honestly it doesn't. If you can't believe I speak any truth or that I am hiding an agenda from the start, there is no point in having what could otherwise be a constructive conversation.

I'm telling you honestly and civilly what I read into things, with no intent to trigger you, but just to show you how I see things. Apparently instead of reading behind the trigger inducing people mentioned and actually reading me, you would rather ignore the parts that actually represent my view instead of how I see other views. Here is my peace, I hold no ill will towards you for calling me a liar or trans-phobic, even though those are laughable concepts if you knew me.

As I've said before, I am not a sock puppet account or whatever, the name Puzzlesocks has been a gaming name of mine since Everquest days. Look up the character name Puzzlekaz on wowarmory and drool over my Death's Demise title if you like. My stance on life is to stay out of other peoples lives. I don't vote because I don't feel I have the right to tell other people how to live. I'm a pacifist and a Zen Buddhist. My core belief is that I don't give the slightest shit what other people want to believe, because depending on the circumstances of my life, I might have believed it to. I think everything is natural regardless of how beautiful or awful it is, and that the fact we are even alive to have these bullshit debates is a miracle.

If it makes it easier on you, Imagine I am a child and let me ask again: What is the issue with peace and support for everyone? The reason America is actually so great is because people (ideally) get over the fact that you are black/white/gay/whatever and you are just an American. This push for special regulations and protected classes goes against the very guiding principle of "We are one people, one nation." Fuck fighting for white people, and fuck fighting for black people. Just fight for people as a whole. To me, that needs no further clarification.

[CritFromAfar]

Reasons not to debate:

1. Winning a debate is not equivalent to being right or smarter. You can watch William Lane Craig mop the floor with Christopher Hitchens if you want an example of that.

Debating is mostly tactics. If debating was simply listing facts with opinions, it could be done by handing out a small leaflet to the audience. No, debating is like a dance. You need to constantly be on the attack and simultaneously deflect away from any weaknesses in your argument. Debates are often entirely decided by the audience. If every time i say to you 2+2 = 4 i get no applause, then you respond with "clearly 2+2=5" to thunderous applause, the general takeaway even by people who know that 2+2=4 will be that i lost. Thats just how the human brain works.

2. Mutual benefit. Typically there isn't one. For instance, Joe Rogan is a multi millionaire. Explain to me why he would ever debate a red haired feminist who has 30 followers on twitter? No reason. Even if he wins, it will be seen as punching down and people will rightfully use the logic i listed above to point out how pathetic this whole scenario could be.

Another reason is the cost. Remember Jontron vs Destiny? Yeah, who do you think came out unscathed on that one? It was Destiny. Destiny with his relatively tiny audience climbed out of that debate with a much bigger following, while Jontron was called a nazi for months and still is, years later. If you have something going for you, debating your legitimacy is the worst thing you can do. This includes if you're of complete sound mind and are 100% in the right.

3. The audience's benefit. There really is only one benefit - entertainment. I watched countless hours of Christopher Hitchens debate when i was a kid, which lead me into all other kinds of debates. Not once during the before and after audience poll of the debated question, did i see a significant difference. At most, it was maybe a 5% difference. If it was a complete slam dunk, it was maybe 10%.

People don't change their mind by watching debates. They change their mind by peer pressure. You can sit a person down and tell them for months on end that their diet is unhealthy and they will die in their 40s if they don't change it. Will they? Hell no. What will get them to change it then? Simple - peer pressure. Wanna know whats more powerful than being told facts by hundreds of doctors? Catching someone glancing in disgust at your flabby body as you enter the pool. Thats how people change. They change to bolster their ego. Most people are ego driven and having a dent in your ego is by far one of the most powerful motivators for people to change. You can say its for the wrong reasons, but if you start spouting that you think the blacks are evil and your friends all look at you like you're a weirdo, thats gonna change your views faster than any intellectual on the planet ever will.

Formal debate probably wouldn't allow personal attacks at all. You would probably lose automatically if you did that, as the point of formal debate is to establish credibility and to discuss contradicting view points, and formal debate tends to more strictly adhere to not using logical fallacies, which are directly contrary to any debaters credibility in a debate. If your opponent argued 2+2=5 factually they'd be wrong and their facts would be wrong and they wouldn't be a credible source of debate.

Someone that can't debate someone with opposing views to theirs, no matter how popular or unpopular, probably wouldn't win in a debate. If they didn't notice the person, on the other hand, that would be different.

I'm fairly certain that appealing to emotions tends to be a logical fallacy, and using anything other than fact and reason probably wouldn't win them any credibility in a formal debate. If a debate is televised on a talk show or any show meant for entertainment purposes, than chances are it won't be a very formal debate.

Informal debate is way more common, which is pretty much what happens on public forums all the time. Because no one really cares too much about logical fallacies and anytime I've seen someone try to use them strictly I've seen people roll their eyes into the back of their heads.

[Nihilist74]

Don’t answer the foolish arguments of fools, or you will become as foolish as they are.

[kasuke06]

Don’t answer the foolish arguments of fools, or you will become as foolish as they are.

And whom are you to determine which person is or isn't a fool? What is or isn't a foolish argument?

Is it that your own views are utterly infallible, or that you are afraid of them being challenged?

[Nihilist74]

I don't support deregulation of the people conservatives want to deregulate.
I don't support trickle down economics.
I don't support the religious affiliations to right winger politics who are trying to stop abortions and gay rights.
I don't support closeted or uncloseted racists.
These are ideas that you are not going to change my mind about any more than I am going to change your mind about it.
There is no point in arguing these things.
I have never liked any republicans because they support these ideas.

[Zython]

The vast majority of people are so retarded that they can't bring the goal or what should be the actual main goal ahead of their emotional responses.
I asked this kind of question on a lot of mmo-c "anti-trump warriors". I asked them how do you believe you will win an election if you ostracize and only throw hate on the other side without understanding where they come from and even attempting in any kind of manner to manipulate that to your own view/interest. All I got was YOU TRUMPIST YOU DERP DERP TRUMPIST, EVERYONE IS TRUMPIST DERP DERP WHO CARES ABOUT ELECTION ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT I NOT TRUMPIST DERP AND YOU TRUMPIST DERP. I WONNERED! FUCK THE ELECTION!
I'm not even american nevermind entertaining those redneck trumpist views but the highlight was quite obvious. When you hate something and someone so much , you stop caring about what the greater good behaviours should be. You become pure dumb retarded hate still believing in a far recess of your mind that you're still doing the right thing. Now you can hate as much as you want or do w/e tf you want but shouldn't you at least have the clarity to do what needs to be done to defeat that other side instead of fueling it when it comes to the most important thing of all , the actual fucking election that decides "everything" ?
The average leftist american logic from what I gathered online is the one to think that if you spit 50 conservatives a day your vote will count as 100000 in election day.

You realize that 50% of the country didn't vote in 2016, right?

- - - Updated - - -

What claims did I make besides my opinion that I personally view people dismissing arguments rather than making counter arguments, and that facts matter? Considering the first one is opinion based, my claim that facts matter is also up for debate. I mean the humanity did pretty well believing fables for thousands of years. Without baseline facts that we can agree on, we have no way to properly communicate or function. Minutes, Inches, Liters, all of this is constructs we created so that we could have baseline facts with which to communicate as well as measure and study the world. I consider facts pretty important because our society is glued together by them..

I'm just going to bold the claims you made.

There has been an ongoing trend I have noticed with people refusing to use logic or even a base of where they stand in refuting an argument.

Example one: Stefan Molyneux is a philosopher and self-admitted anarchist who despite having a large following and consistent, reasonably sound (imo) viewpoints on how society functions, is dismissed as being alt-right. Instead of providing counter-arguments and showing how or why his beliefs are wrong, there are those who instead say that because his views differ from theirs, that they have no value or substance.

Example two: Joe Rogan, despite having one of the most listened to podcasts and having spent years talking to hundreds of experts on varying sides of many debates, is often dismissed as being a meathead druggie. I've even heard the argument that any information on Rogan's podcast is irrelevant just because he was the host of Fear Factor and a comedian.

It's far easier to dismiss someone else than it is to affirm your own views, and in the case of Stephen Crowder, you have people who hate him for holding certain views when their own views either align or lack logical consistency. This isn't to say that all ideas that the above names have had are correct, and many of the people above hold differing viewpoints from each other, but are willing to have reasonable long-form discussions to explain their views.

So this brings the question: Do you believe that it is morally acceptable to hold to ideas without question even in the face of evidence?

In other words, do you feel that a single belief that someone has discounts the rest of who they are as a person? If (hypothetically) Albert Einstein believed in aliens or racism, does that discount his work in mathematics? If Trump is physically repulsive, does it mean his ideas on helping veterans, or rehabilitation of prisoners are also wrong? Or on the flip side, does all the good Mother Teresa meant excuse her from ruining thousands of lives by attempting uneducated 'care'?

I believe that you have to tackle singular opinions on a singular basis with facts. The worst way to change someones mind is to force them to comply and insult them, you have to be open to dialogue with "the enemy" for compromise to happen. You have to be open to viewing ideas you might feel abhorrent in order to have peace. What do you think?

Edit: I'm not going to address the rest of that since that doesn't address what I said at all.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

A lot of people assume debate is the equivalent of a conversion therapy. The reason is simple: For a lot of individuals, a debate put their own beliefs in danger. They try to protect themselves of an inner cognitive dissonance by shutting down the conversation before it even had the time to begin.

It's not new per say. It happened a lot before and in previous historical kingdoms. We were just lucky to be born in a time where debate was encouraged, but unlucky enough to see its downfall.

[Doctor Amadeus]

It would be nice if you read the complete post instead of focusing on trigger words and ignoring the rest, which again, was the entire point of this topic. You seem to think it has some sort of conspiracy behind it, but honestly it doesn't. If you can't believe I speak any truth or that I am hiding an agenda from the start, there is no point in having what could otherwise be a constructive conversation.

I'm telling you honestly and civilly what I read into things, with no intent to trigger you, but just to show you how I see things. Apparently instead of reading behind the trigger inducing people mentioned and actually reading me, you would rather ignore the parts that actually represent my view instead of how I see other views. Here is my peace, I hold no ill will towards you for calling me a liar or trans-phobic, even though those are laughable concepts if you knew me.

As I've said before, I am not a sock puppet account or whatever, the name Puzzlesocks has been a gaming name of mine since Everquest days. Look up the character name Puzzlekaz on wowarmory and drool over my Death's Demise title if you like. My stance on life is to stay out of other peoples lives. I don't vote because I don't feel I have the right to tell other people how to live. I'm a pacifist and a Zen Buddhist. My core belief is that I don't give the slightest shit what other people want to believe, because depending on the circumstances of my life, I might have believed it to. I think everything is natural regardless of how beautiful or awful it is, and that the fact we are even alive to have these bullshit debates is a miracle.

If it makes it easier on you, Imagine I am a child and let me ask again: What is the issue with peace and support for everyone? The reason America is actually so great is because people (ideally) get over the fact that you are black/white/gay/whatever and you are just an American. This push for special regulations and protected classes goes against the very guiding principle of "We are one people, one nation." Fuck fighting for white people, and fuck fighting for black people. Just fight for people as a whole. To me, that needs no further clarification.

This is why copying and pasting ought to be frowned upon and banned everywhere much like stupid meme's UNLESS the source cited is clearly interpreted as it pertains to the subject and only insofar it speaks to evidence used.

Peddling an opinion, and posting unrelated bullshit or misrepresenting someone else's works really is a problem

You have a lot of nerve complaining about cherry picking facts or what is being read when you are providing content not authored by you to embolden a point of view you aren't trying to be honest about, or have no intelligent information on.

Nothing easier that parroting an argument that isn't yours or copying and pasting data or information you don't understand or misrepresent as your own.


So far your argument is that you should be able to argue based on whatever rules you have made up in your own mind, based on whatever standard you see fit, and you whine and complain not only that people aren't as nice to you as you think they should be especially about your warped ideas.

But some how you are also owed an argument when they unlike you are capable of figuring out there is no debate with you. You're wrong, your argument is misguided at best.

And you are #294437484 to make the same failed argument in a way you may think is NEW because you chose New or Different words in a GENIUS WAY.

So far that is all I have gathered since you started this obnoxious position.

[Puzzlesocks]

""Also, do you have any sources for any of your claims? Because you keep talking about how facts are important, but you don't back up any of your claims for some reason.""

I'm just going to bold the claims you made.

Lets go through those claims shall we?

1-Stefan Molyneux is a philosopher
Let us just dictionary definition, because you can't claim someone isn't a philosopher just because they have ideas you don't agree with. I don't agree with a lot of Freud, but I can't claim he isn't a philosopher. Not surprisingly, being a philosopher is very easy.

Definition of philosophy
1a(1) : all learning exclusive of technical precepts and practical arts
b : a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means
c : an analysis of the grounds of and concepts expressing fundamental beliefs

2.Instead of providing counter-arguments and showing how or why his beliefs are wrong, there are those who instead say that because his views differ from theirs, that they have no value or substance.
This is literally this thread, if you like I can link to many posts that stated just that implicitly. I could even throw in a couple that stated that my view has no value because I used him as an example in asking a different question entirely.

3.having spent years talking to hundreds of experts on varying sides of many debates (Talking about Joe Rogan)
This is literally the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Over 1300 episodes of 2hour+ unedited conversations with experts and interesting people. If you didn't know about it beforehand, you're welcome.

4.when their own views either align or lack logical consistency(about Stephen Crowder)
Have you ever actually watched his "Change My Mind" show on youtube? Some of the people he interviews are legitimately confused about their own views, a good example being a girl who thought she was pro-choice, but instead realistically leaned more towards the pro-life side. Crowder debates a lot of people fresh out of high school who don't really know where they stand yet. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people dislike his tactics, I can't say I approve of them all the time myself, but other times he is legitimately helping people realize where they stand.

Edit: I'm not going to address the rest of that since that doesn't address what I said at all.

It doesn't, but my initial response did. Facts matter because without facts we don't have common ground for communication. Debates are ideally how we come to common ground on what facts are. At this time, we can both agree that a stone is a stone, but at one point someone had to convince someone else to call it a stone.

- - - Updated - - -

-snip-
So far that is all I have gathered since you started this obnoxious position.

I think you and I have not been reading the same thread, because I have no position, and have stated that I have no position repeatedly. If this is indeed a serious post, I worry about your welfare, as your state of mind may be off. You appear to be hallucinating.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

I think you and I have not been reading the same thread, because I have no position, and have stated that I have no position repeatedly.

Do you realize you just outright admitted that you're shitposting? You talk about people refusing to debate, then you claim to have no position to avoid the arguments you've been losing repeatedly in this thread.

You are a caricature of your thread title at this point.

[InTheEnd]

Debating requires thinking.
Most people resist thinking.
Therefore, few people debate properly.

How's that for logic?

[Sliske]

Formal debate probably wouldn't allow personal attacks at all. You would probably lose automatically if you did that, as the point of formal debate is to establish credibility and to discuss contradicting view points, and formal debate tends to more strictly adhere to not using logical fallacies, which are directly contrary to any debaters credibility in a debate. If your opponent argued 2+2=5 factually they'd be wrong and their facts would be wrong and they wouldn't be a credible source of debate.

There is more ways to lose a debate than just say nothing but insults or incorrect 'facts' - theres a really good Christopher Hitchens vs a creationist debate, where i believe the question was 'Does God exist?' but Chris spends the entire hour talking about how awful the god is - pointing out all of its atrocities if it did exist, all of the atrocities committed in its name. While these are all true, its easily conceivable that God could exist while being a cunt and asking for the sacrifice of children and so on. He totally lost that debate intellectually.

Theres another one where he argues with William Lane Craig. WLC, of course, has done this a million times. So he has pre-planned out dialogue trees

a dialogue tree, assuming you don't know, is a debate tactic where you lead your opponent down a pre-planned list of questions to arrive at your conclusion for you. An example would be - Do you see red cars outside? Yes. Do you see red cars near your house? Yes. Then it follows that your neighbour has a red car. The point of a dialogue tree is to bolster a dogshit illogical conclusion with logical questions.

Anyways, WLC does this the entire debate, Christopher obviously isn't prepared for it - the smartest man on the planet will be made to look a fool in the eyes of a pleb if he fails to answer a question and CH did this non stop in that debate. So he got out debated and shat on.

Both of these were formal debates btw.

If a debate is televised on a talk show or any show meant for entertainment purposes, than chances are it won't be a very formal debate.

Debates that aren't televised or held in arenas simply don't happen. You're talking about people that make millions a year - taking up hours of their time, plus time spent travelling and preparing needs a pay off. Debates are almost always either for charity or to sell a book. This doesn't mean the debate can't be formal. The only thing you need for a formal debate is a moderator to keep people from personal insults or talking over the other one.

Logical fallacies should lose you the argument, but they're so damn popular for a reason - they work, especially if you aren't aware of them. This is why the dialogue tree style of debate is so popular, why every single 'SJW PWNED NOOB REKT!111' video begins with an SJW saying their piece and the epic right winger emoji running her down a dialogue tree.

The thing about dialogue trees is there is only one option - to refuse to answer. But you can't do that, because that looks JUST AS BAD as walking down the dialogue tree - you look like you just got fucking hammered. Unless you've the on the spot intellect to recite an entire argument for why dialogue trees are a dogshit way to debate, you're going to just look like a flustered idiot, panicking and stalling for time. The only thing a person needs to say is "so you're saying you can't / won't answer my question then?" and they've, in the eyes of public opinion, won.

[Dougie Cooper]

Yup, you just voided your entire thread. You're shitposting with the cowardly option of saying you "have no position" to avoid the fact your arguments are not winners.

Good job fighting for "debate"!

Definitely feels like you being CryotriX is accurate, now.

Did CryotriX delete their account, or is Thanos a moderator on this forum? Because they seem to have been obliterated.

On topic, I don't do online "debates" generally because I'm tired of having to defend my rights to exist and to be myself. I shouldn't have to explain over and over that I and others like me deserve to have normal lives the way we are. I'll answer practically any question that was asked genuinely and in good faith, but as soon as someone goes into, "Debate me!" territory, it's better for my mental well-being just to block 'em.

[downnola]

Did CryotriX delete their account, or is Thanos a moderator on this forum? Because they seem to have been obliterated.

There's a weird trend I've noticed here with some posters. They accumulate a ton of posts within a few months and after they've been banned at least once they're never heard from again. Sometimes they delete their accounts, but most of them they just abandon them and never post again.

They almost always share the same politics, too. They're "anti-imperialist" and love to whine about corporate power, Democrats, liberals, the U.S. military industrial complex, NATO, and they really hate identity politics and SJWs. They also seem to really have it out for Muslims too, usually of the Sunni denomination (Iran and Shias don't seem to trigger them as much).

I've called a few of them out for pretending to be American, despite the fact that you can tell English is their second language based on their odd word choices and suspect grammar. When that happens they will often stop posting or they take a break for a couple weeks and pretend nothing happened.

[Dougie Cooper]

There's a weird trend I've noticed here with some posters. They accumulate a ton of posts within a few months and after they've been banned at least once they're never heard from again. Sometimes they delete their accounts, but most of them they just abandon them and never post again.

They almost always share the same politics, too. They're "anti-imperialist" and love to whine about corporate power, Democrats, liberals, the U.S. military industrial complex, NATO, and they really hate identity politics and SJWs. They also seem to really have it out for Muslims too, usually of the Sunni denomination (Iran and Shias don't seem to trigger them as much).

I've called a few of them out for pretending to be American, despite the fact that you can tell English is their second language based on their odd word choices and suspect grammar. When that happens they will often stop posting or they take a break for a couple weeks and pretend nothing happened.

Well that's weird and disconcerting. I haven't paid enough attention to notice a trend myself, but I'll keep my eyes open more for this sort of thing.

[Endus]

There's a weird trend I've noticed here with some posters. They accumulate a ton of posts within a few months and after they've been banned at least once they're never heard from again. Sometimes they delete their accounts, but most of them they just abandon them and never post again.

They almost always share the same politics, too. They're "anti-imperialist" and love to whine about corporate power, Democrats, liberals, the U.S. military industrial complex, NATO, and they really hate identity politics and SJWs. They also seem to really have it out for Muslims too, usually of the Sunni denomination (Iran and Shias don't seem to trigger them as much).

I've called a few of them out for pretending to be American, despite the fact that you can tell English is their second language based on their odd word choices and suspect grammar. When that happens they will often stop posting or they take a break for a couple weeks and pretend nothing happened.

Speaking as someone who's worked behind the scenes here but has no clue of any specifics regarding any specific user interactions since I stepped down, if the account vanishes, it's USUALLY because they were found to be a ban evader. The higher-ups have ways to nuke entire accounts, deleting their existence and all posts attached. It CAN also be used in cases where the user resided in the EU, I believe, where "right to be forgotten" laws exist; there's a legal obligation there to delete accounts on request, but that doesn't apply to users outside those countries. That came in near the end of my tenure and it was always above my non-pay grade too.

Otherwise, though, the general position is that accounts won't be deleted on request. If you ask nicely, they might scramble your password and e-mail so you can't ever recover access, and let you start a new account with a fresh face, but the old one would still exist as far as other users are concerned. If they vanish, it's almost certainly either a deleted ban evasion account, or a "right to be forgotten" request from a user in a nation that requires that.

[Eveningforest]

There's a weird trend I've noticed here with some posters. They accumulate a ton of posts within a few months and after they've been banned at least once they're never heard from again. Sometimes they delete their accounts, but most of them they just abandon them and never post again.

They almost always share the same politics, too. They're "anti-imperialist" and love to whine about corporate power, Democrats, liberals, the U.S. military industrial complex, NATO, and they really hate identity politics and SJWs. They also seem to really have it out for Muslims too, usually of the Sunni denomination (Iran and Shias don't seem to trigger them as much).

I've called a few of them out for pretending to be American, despite the fact that you can tell English is their second language based on their odd word choices and suspect grammar. When that happens they will often stop posting or they take a break for a couple weeks and pretend nothing happened.

Plot twist: What you describe as a trend of several accounts that share similar characteristics, have always been one person. See if you can spot CryotriX in 2 weeks.

[Dougie Cooper]

I only noticed because I tried to return to a CryotriX post, and it gave me a "thread not found" error. Thought maybe it was just a post that had gotten nuked, but it was doing that for every one. Thanks for the info though Endus, that certainly explains a lot.

[CritFromAfar]

There is more ways to lose a debate than just say nothing but insults or incorrect 'facts' - theres a really good Christopher Hitchens vs a creationist debate, where i believe the question was 'Does God exist?' but Chris spends the entire hour talking about how awful the god is - pointing out all of its atrocities if it did exist, all of the atrocities committed in its name. While these are all true, its easily conceivable that God could exist while being a cunt and asking for the sacrifice of children and so on. He totally lost that debate intellectually.

Theres another one where he argues with William Lane Craig. WLC, of course, has done this a million times. So he has pre-planned out dialogue trees

a dialogue tree, assuming you don't know, is a debate tactic where you lead your opponent down a pre-planned list of questions to arrive at your conclusion for you. An example would be - Do you see red cars outside? Yes. Do you see red cars near your house? Yes. Then it follows that your neighbour has a red car. The point of a dialogue tree is to bolster a dogshit illogical conclusion with logical questions.

Anyways, WLC does this the entire debate, Christopher obviously isn't prepared for it - the smartest man on the planet will be made to look a fool in the eyes of a pleb if he fails to answer a question and CH did this non stop in that debate. So he got out debated and shat on.

Both of these were formal debates btw.



Debates that aren't televised or held in arenas simply don't happen. You're talking about people that make millions a year - taking up hours of their time, plus time spent travelling and preparing needs a pay off. Debates are almost always either for charity or to sell a book. This doesn't mean the debate can't be formal. The only thing you need for a formal debate is a moderator to keep people from personal insults or talking over the other one.

Logical fallacies should lose you the argument, but they're so damn popular for a reason - they work, especially if you aren't aware of them. This is why the dialogue tree style of debate is so popular, why every single 'SJW PWNED NOOB REKT!111' video begins with an SJW saying their piece and the epic right winger emoji running her down a dialogue tree.

The thing about dialogue trees is there is only one option - to refuse to answer. But you can't do that, because that looks JUST AS BAD as walking down the dialogue tree - you look like you just got fucking hammered. Unless you've the on the spot intellect to recite an entire argument for why dialogue trees are a dogshit way to debate, you're going to just look like a flustered idiot, panicking and stalling for time. The only thing a person needs to say is "so you're saying you can't / won't answer my question then?" and they've, in the eyes of public opinion, won.

Right, I've had people do similar things to me, except they weren't good at equivalent analogies and usually ended up just making comparisons that didn't make sense to begin with, and all doing that did was make them seem dishonest, because their logical conclusion was incorrect for the facts given and they refused to accept it. So they spent the entire conversation doing that to try and make themselves seem right, but they still couldn't grasp how 1+2 didn't equal 5.

But see, there's a reason why fallacies discredit people. If they move to emotionally manipulative tactics to prove their points than they're playing into emotions rather than letting their facts be the strength of the argument. If they have to be manipulative than their points must not have been very strong to begin with, and people are prone to trying to twist facts or making things up to make the conclusion they want fit. Moving to personal attacks kind of just makes it look like they don't have a good enough argument to be able to argue their point without trying to distract people.

If discrediting their opponent with personal attacks or emotional manipulation is the only way that they have to make their argument better, than they're not winning because of their facts or ability to reason. They discredit themselves with that behavior.

There are also plenty of times that people don't see how something might not prove things the way they think it does. People lying about the facts discredits the basis of their argument. I'm pretty sure leading people into answers is somehow problematic, too, I'm just not sure how.

[downnola]

Speaking as someone who's worked behind the scenes here but has no clue of any specifics regarding any specific user interactions since I stepped down, if the account vanishes, it's USUALLY because they were found to be a ban evader. The higher-ups have ways to nuke entire accounts, deleting their existence and all posts attached. It CAN also be used in cases where the user resided in the EU, I believe, where "right to be forgotten" laws exist; there's a legal obligation there to delete accounts on request, but that doesn't apply to users outside those countries. That came in near the end of my tenure and it was always above my non-pay grade too.

Otherwise, though, the general position is that accounts won't be deleted on request. If you ask nicely, they might scramble your password and e-mail so you can't ever recover access, and let you start a new account with a fresh face, but the old one would still exist as far as other users are concerned. If they vanish, it's almost certainly either a deleted ban evasion account, or a "right to be forgotten" request from a user in a nation that requires that.

For some odd reason I was under the impression that you could just delete your account. Well ban evasion nukes certainly makes more sense considering the context.