Generalities

[andrewducker]

It's always amusing watching people argue generalities.

I'm currently specifically thinking of one of the many ones here, where people are going through a "people said false things"/"Oh no they didn't" phase. It strikes me that it would be much more productive to state examples and say "They said X here and it's cearly untrue because here is the actual truth." which would then give something to debate over, rather than making vague assertions.

But that might actually get somewhere and end in agreement, so it seems unlikely to occur.

Comments

[derumi.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Americans get to hear all sorts of lies from Democrats and Republicans every four years (or less) on teevee, I don't see why they're whining about lies now. If we really cared about lies, and lies really did matter, we wouldn't have had our... ummm... hmmm... last 40 presidents or so.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

But then you could never argue about something that you didn't have loads of facts (to hand) about!

Like any game/sport, it's most enjoyable when your fellow players have about the same level of skill and equipment (in this case facts) as youself. If you are either totally outclassed or are the one totally outclassing, then it's not really any fun.

However, you can learn from someone who is better than you at the game, but they have to have this aim in mind, and not be intent on just destroying you.