Blissful IgnoranceOver the past few days I've been having an interesting experience in someone's journal. Allow me to give you the backstory behind all of this before talking about my own experience:It seems a user made some journal entries that made the Community Stats, which caught the eye of the Politics and Current Events forum. It mostly caught their eye because the contents of the journals were inflammatory and had no basis in fact or evidence, only subjective opinion being presented as if it was fact. Seeking to get this person to a place where they could try to develop their arguments in an environment that mimics peer review, where arguments need to be defensible, one of the P&CE regulars invited this user to join the forum and enter into political discourse there. The user declined. Then the user blocked the person who brought the invitation to him. Then the user went through that person's friendlist and blocked everyone he thought would have an opposing viewpoint. Then he put up a journal about it, and this is where I come in. The journal did several things, such as identify him as someone who thinks Ayn Rand was a prophet, establish that he doesn't think the Constitution needs to evolve with the times, make a completely unsupported claim that Obama will destroy the nation, and establish him as someone who places a lot of importance on the number of watchers he has (I have almost 700, by the way). I made three posts in the journal in which I tried to coax him into the P&CE forum, and then I stopped trying because it was clear he wouldn't do it. At that point, since being an admin means he can't block me, he left me a personal comment that insulted me and made some false accusations against me. When I replied with another personal comment that challenged him to back up what he said, he deleted it without responding. After that point, I only responded in the journal to clarify and correct people in what I had said previously in the journal. Over time it got to the point where the user didn't want me posting there, and I didn't want to post there, but it makes sense to me to reply in the same venue as the question/problem/etc is posed. Eventually I specifically asked people if they had anything to say to me to take it to my PM box. Here's where it gets frustrating: after that comment, someone left one in which they said I must be "of the same magnanimous ilk that are trying to ass-fuck our country right now as, like them, you know better than anyone else, and want to enlighten us with your superior wisdom." This followed a whole host of insults and the like from him, and was followed by him telling me to prove him wrong by not replying. I felt I should respond to the quoted bit, but as I still didn't want to post in the journal I sent him a PM instead that basically said a) I never said anything of the sort, and b) that's not who you think it is. I didn't expect a response. The person to whom I sent the message specifically said they were going to ignore me. Imagine my surprise when he reposted my message as a comment on the journal, and then claimed it proved his point. That my not posting anything in the journal means he was right about my "need" to post in the journal. And then his buddy declared victory over me. For my not doing what I said I didn't want to do. Allow me to sum up what I said in my comments on that journal: If you have an opinion, the most important people you should be talking to are those who disagree with you. That way, if your opinion is notable you will be able to defend it against them, and if your opinion is not notable you will learn what you need to know in order to form a new, better opinion. As new things happen, you must continue to learn about them and their influence in order to stay intelligently informed. When I see someone who's avoiding doing this, I try to help them do it, as I see it as missed potential, and I'm a natural-born helper. At no point did I ever state any political views other than "Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to current events is purely coincidental." At no point did I (as far as I know) insult anyone. At no point did I overextend my adminly powers beyond the passive "cannot be blocked" feature allowing me to ...well, not be blocked, and at no point did I push any ideology or beliefs. And yet in the comments of that journal I had many people accuse me of those things. I'm not making this journal to whine, nor am I making it to try to demonize anyone in particular. I've been very careful not to mention which journal this all happened in, or any names involved. I made this journal to draw attention to a growing behavioral trend, and the trend is this: when someone has nothing intelligent to say on a topic, rather than stop talking they will attack the people representing the opposing viewpoint in whatever unrelated way they can, and try to parley that into somehow being relevant to the topic at hand. In this case, I said opposing viewpoints are important, and defended that point vigorously, and I was accused of, as a foreigner, lecturing Americans about Obama. What we have here are people who are so dead set in their beliefs that they become very afraid whenever someone comes around with legitimate counterpoints to what they have to say. And when they encounter people with those differing viewpoints, rather than try to defend their stance, they shut them out, ignore them, stick their fingers in their ears, and do whatever is necessary to ignore them, to the point of insulting them to try to make them just go away. They are literally unwilling to even consider that they might not be the perfect bastion of knowledge they think they are, and because they avoid confrontation they will never be able to defend their views properly because they will never learn how, nor to grow intellectually. Instead they stagnate, right where they are. Ah, to be so blissfully ignorant. Must be nice. |
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