The mission of the U.S. government is not to keep the people SAFE; it is to keep them FREE

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There are several problems in that reasoning; I'll not try to cover them all, but touch on some high points.

The principle expressed in the first paragraph (and recurring later) is generically like the proverbial 'motherhood and apple pie', while in specific situations it may become a tool wielded by an advocate of an unreasonable position to prevent others from making an obvious criticism of that position — like the Emperor claiming it's uncivil for anyone to say someone else has no clothes.

Another theme is trying to frame a controversial debate in a way that quietly presupposes multiple things most people would say were invalid from the start. Such as "why the population has become so childlike, so immoral, and so psychotic that the need to discuss disarming the population even arises", which presupposes at least three things at once — that the population has those characteristics, that whether or not it does has any bearing on the gun-related issues under discussion, and that the proposal under discussion involves disarming the population. This technique works better if one presupposes three or more things at once; that way, if someone challenges any one of the presuppositions, the other presuppositions may effectively support it, while challenging all of them at once would be harder for the challenger to orchestrate.

My guess is, you aren't using these techniques deliberately. But that doesn't mean you aren't using them; they're a sort of infection that spreads from person to person by imitation.

Pi zero (talk)11:43, 21 April 2013

I am interested in enjoying "wholesome connection" with you, in the form of an intelligent, mutually stimulating conversation that is not marred by animosity. This is always my main reason for participating in conversation. For me, the experience is not competitive; I don't think of a conversation as something to win.

IMO, your entire post consists of an ad hominem attack in which you try to refute the idea that I've expressed by suggesting that there is something repugnant, and possibly malicious, about the form in which I express it. My response is that form and motive are irrelevant. Even if the form of my post constitutes "a technique", and even if I am using that technique deliberately, all of that is irrelevant and is not effective in refuting my idea.

I think that we agree that the frequency with which mass killings occur presents a problem for society. One approach to reduce mass killings is to disarm the population. My point is simply that there is another approach: Develop the character of the population. Find a way for society to do better at the job of raising up the children into good, strong men and women. I would argue further that the Constitution of the United States bars the easy approach of disarming the population.

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)16:41, 21 April 2013

I have made no personal attack; that characterization of my remarks is quite inaccurate. I've assessed your reasoning frankly, and acknowledged you yourself may well be unaware of the techniques you are using. You'll miss out on a lot of reasoning if you react to reason by perceiving personal attack. I also note, you are repeating the misstep of presupposing that the proposal under discussion involves disarming the population, and additionally (though in this instance somewhat less prominently) presupposing both that the character of the population is problematic, and that changing that character would help.

Pi zero (talk)11:26, 22 April 2013

Pi zero, the thrust of your post is that THE FORM of my post functions to deceive and you insinuate that I might be using that form for that purpose intentionally. That is an ad hominem argument. It is disrespectful. Rather than accuse me of being deceptive, you should have used your post to expose the deception.

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)03:46, 23 April 2013

Your accusation is patently false. I have expressed the opinion that you were probably not aware of what you were doing (an opinion I still hold, btw); this is, of course, as far as I could honestly go in the matter, since I am not telepathic and therefore have no way of knowing for sure that you were unaware of the tactics. You on the other hand have —if you are being careful about your words— signally failed to reciprocate, accusing me of deliberate personal attack against you. This is another technique belief systems commonly use to insulate their proponents against rational dialog: condition their proponents to accuse others of the tactics they themselves are conditioned to use. The truly appalling thing about this sort of strategy is that it does not require self-awareness by the person wielding it; indeed, such belief systems would not be so successful if their proponents had to realize what they were doing, because that would make it harder for them to acquire and retain proponents.

Pi zero (talk)14:48, 23 April 2013

Not all ad hominem arguments are personal attacks. Yours was an ad hominem argument that was not an attack. Your post was not without merit, and if this had been a discussion about forms of rhetoric, I would have enthusiastically explored your idea about how form can be deceptive. But my position remains that rather than suggest that my post employed a deceptive form, intentionally or otherwise, you should have just exposed the deception. You still have not done so, and you have provided no reason for either me or sympathetic readers to abandon the opinion that I expressed in the allegedly deceptive post.

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)16:11, 23 April 2013

You are using sophistry to distract from the lack of merit in your 'argument'. I don't care whether you know you're doing it, except that if you aren't aware of what you're doing, you're preventing yourself from being able to think clearly, and I feel sorry for people who do that to themselves (in a sense, it makes you a victim of a non-rational belief system that has ensnared you). And this has nothing to do with what you do or don't believe about the issue at hand, only with your inability to reason about it.

Pi zero (talk)17:14, 23 April 2013

You assert that my post is deceptive. Please expose the deception. Please, no more about the form of my post, about what I am and am not aware of, and about whether you feel sorry for me. All of that is ad hominem.

There really isn't much reasoning in my post. It only stated a point of view. My goal was not to persuade; it was only to communicate, to produce a, "Oh, I haven't looked at it that way!" or "Hmmm, thanks, I'll think about that."

This isn't about winning or losing. It's, fundamentally, about loving. Connecting to another precious, beautiful, wonderful person. You. That's really all that matters, because soon we are both going to be consumed by the intense fire of a jet of burning natural gas, and the bits which remain are going to be placed into a steel can that is brazed shut, and that's the end of me and the end of you.

The only thing that really matters about either of us is our love.

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)04:33, 24 April 2013

"Please, no more about the form of my post, about what I am and am not aware of, and about whether you feel sorry for me. All of that is ad hominem."

Here in lies the problem: The form you post is part of the deception. But for the sake of clarity: Your argument is premised on untruths, misinformation and logical inconsistencies. You then argue in favour of your view based on this. Those arguing with you are forced into a place where they have to address the inherently corrupt foundation of your absurd conclusion or they have to argue against your absurd conclusion. Your faulty starting place make it impossible to argue with you in anyway that does not derail the argument.

By the way, randomly, did you disclaim your threat of violence against those who failed to agree with your position? I have yet to see an apology that starts off with "I am sorry I threatened you and others who support same-sex marriage with violence for not supporting my position. It was never my intent, and I will work harder to never be perceived as threatening others with violence again." Because until you do, your last line is a false argument and a clear deception on your part in order to make your argument appear more rationale.

LauraHale (talk)05:11, 24 April 2013

Hello, Laura Hale. I responded to your request for an apology that you posted on my talk page. For about a week, my talk page was being vandalized in a way that made it impossible for us to converse; the vandal kept deleting all of the content and then it would reappear. Your request is off topic here and is defamatory. Please discuss it with me on my talk page, which appears to be stable now.

Regarding my post here, it contains no argument. It merely outlines my view of the issue by listing my conclusion and my main assumptions. Such a list can hardly be called deceptive. You can easily see my assuptions. If you think that one or more of them are wrong, you can easily say so. If you think that my conclusion would not necessarily, or ever, follow from my assumptions, you can easily say so.

I have not, and do not intend to, argue with anyone here. My desire is for wholesome connection, for friendly conversation. Let us focus on whatever core values and ideals we embrace in common.

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)05:27, 24 April 2013

Your user talk page has never been deleted, and the only edits that have significantly reduced its size have been edits by you.

Pi zero (talk)17:54, 24 April 2013

You should have engaged me on this topic on my talk page, not here.

That is not true, and I can prove it. I made snapshots of both my user page and my talk page immediately after making changes, so I have a complete record of the changes that actually occurred. During the interval in question, I also took snapshots of the revision history page. I have several of those snapshots that show a revision history that lists ONLY the creation of the page, which is contradicted by the other snapshots.

I am a newbie to this system. I think that someone who has admin privileges, who is hostile to me for expressing the viewpoints that I embrace, and who is willing to abuse his or her admin privileges intentionally vandalized my talk page.

During one of the vandalisms, all of the posts from Laura Hale and you and everyone else was deleted with no trace on the revision history page. I had snapshotted them, so I manually restored the conversations. When I checked the next morning, the page had been reverted to another incarnation that I had created in response to a prior vandalism. This kind of thing happened two or three times, in which I would repair the page, only to check it after about 10 hours to see that my repair was gone, replaced by an earlier incarnation of the page. I finally got it more or less the way that I wanted it and gave up on trying to use it.

Either I was vandalized or there is something wrong with the software. At this point, being a newbie, experiencing unmistakeable hostility from both admins and other users, and being forced to use a wiki technology that presumes a level of trust and goodwill that is clearly not realized here, I have absolutely no confidence that I will ever be able to communicate effectively on my own talk page. My plan is to not touch it until someone posts a conversation opener and then to respond to that person while carefully documenting exactly what I do and what, if any, vandalism occurs to sabotage the conversation.

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)03:55, 25 April 2013

I do not need proof your talk page was deleted or revisions were done. this here is a full history of it. You fail to understand the difference between BLANKED and DELETED. If you have screencaps, please cite deleted text. No one vandalized your page at all. Please, respected equal, in the spirit of love that you claim to espouse, retract your false allegation.

LauraHale (talk)04:28, 25 April 2013

I am a newbie. All I can say is that my talk page kept changing in ways that not only were not my changes, but kept clobbering my changes. Either the software was doing it or another user was doing it. I was definitely not doing it. My own changes kept getting overwritten.

These kinds of things often happen with newbies. When a person is unfamiliar with a computer environment, he or she does not notice telltales that would reveal to a more experienced user what is going on. Newbies can misunderstand a user interface and unintentionally cause weird things to happen, especially if the system is also new and not thoroughly tested.

I saw enough viewpoint hostility on the part of admins here that I have no faith whatsoever in the editorial objectivity of the people who administer this environment. Given the information that I have, I am convinced that some administrator who knows how to cover his or her tracks intentionally sabotaged my talk page during the ten days in which I was trying to set it up, figure out how everything works here, and respond to Ms. Hale's unreasonable demand that I apologize for saying something that I never said.

I am willing to persevere because I think that you all are doing something very important and something very "new school". I am old and very "old school" and I am quite intrigued and want to understand the new ideas that appear to seem common sense to you but are quite strange to me.

Ms. Hale, please restart your conversation with me on my talk page, and let's have a pleasant conversation there. If the conversation disappears, please be assured that it was not I who deleted/blanked it.

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)04:58, 25 April 2013

So... to be clear, you are admitting 1) Your page was not vandalized, 2) No material was deleted by any contributors, 3) You made a false allegation that you have since retracted where you alleged misconduct, 4) You now understand that your talk page is a place anyone can engage you and that you do not have complete control of this space?

Is this the correct interpretation of your tl;dr (teal deer) response? Respected equal, are you we understanding your words in the same way?

LauraHale (talk)06:58, 25 April 2013

No, no, no, and no. Please read my post again and pay particular attention to:

"...I am convinced that some administrator who knows how to cover his or her tracks intentionally sabotaged my talk page..."

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)14:18, 25 April 2013
 

I just discovered what is happening: I have two talk pages, one for Wikipedia and one for Wikinews.

The integration of the two into what the user experiences as a single web site was confusing for me because the talk pages have an almost identical format and function, and the links at the top of the page that you click to get to them are the same. Which talk page I saw depended randomly on what I happened to be doing before deciding to view my talk page.

Wo'O Ideafarm (talk)14:38, 25 April 2013

Confusions happen. Tbh, though, you should not have been so ready to embrace a nefarious explanation. WN:Never assume.

Pi zero (talk)15:01, 25 April 2013
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pi zero, thank you for the really educational and useful analysis of reasoning applied in opinions about the Wikinews "Gun background checks a no-go in US Senate". Hope the authors and proponents of the failed amendments have followed this discussion carefully, the quality of which really merits much wider coverage by Wikinews.

Kdarwish1 (talk)17:54, 21 April 2013