Soldato
- Joined
- 25 Nov 2007
- Posts
- 5,581
- Location
- London
Beliefs are tightly bound into identity, people can take a criticism of their beliefs extremely personally because in a lot of instances it is an attack on them (not intentionally of course). Look at religion for example, it plays a huge part in how people view themselves.
In most arguments though it's not black and white enough to be able to say it's right or it's wrong. In the context of a debate about the troubles for instance it's extremely nuanced and I didn't have the interest or the information to be able to debate honestly. I would effectively have been toying with his strongly held views just for my amusement, basically real world trolling. To me it was some stuff is read in an article, to him it was lived experience spanning back generations, and not good experience at that. Sometimes it's just not right to engage on a subject when you don't have the same stake in it as the opposing side. That's not to say the debate shouldn't happen, but in that circumstance I wasn't the right person to tackle the subject, even though I could have.
Leaving people in some delusional reality is doing them no favors, if someone cannot handle other ideas or criticism then tough. You can browse the internet and see a lot of people who are living in their own deluded reality, nobody really questions or insults their views properly, and all the passive people are in politically correct mode, not sure i am explaining this properly but i hope you get the basic idea, that's my only goal here.
I do not really ever debate or argue about anything these days, basically i've given up, all these people are dead to me, in real life i listen to such massive nonsense, its basically half tin-foil hat, and the other half is just complete ignorance about anything, with a dash of tin foil hat. I just nod my head at this point look to leave or change the subject
The only exception to this would be competitive gaming online, there i argue and debate all the time, so does everyone, it is the reason we are so good, question everything. On that specific topic i could discuss near endlessly, but apart from that i have nothing more to add i think.