On Tue, December 6, 2011 6:09 pm, Jim Adcock wrote:
It immediately ceases to be a meaningful debate, worthy of the time and effort that other volunteers put into volunteering at PG, and reading and responding to this venue, when you resort to insult words such as "stupidities" and personal attacks against me -- which are against me simply because the others here who disagree with you refuse to respond to you because they know that your only response is to go on personal attacks against them also and call them names. Therefore you actions result in a "shoutdown" where you "shoutdown" all other conversations on this forum -- and then complain that no dialog happens in this forum except in your own voice.
So who's crazier, looney old uncle Bruce, who sits in the corner talking to himself and playing games based on rules he makes up as he goes along, or his nephew James who keeps trying to engage him in rational, but futile, conversation? Sometimes BowerBird says something that can be the seed of a good conversation, in which case I think it's advisable to expand and discuss the idea without necessarily including (or excluding) him. Other times he says things that are just plain factually wrong, in which case I think a correction is in order, not to persuade him that he is wrong, but just to keep other people from thinking that a certain state is the case when it is not. But there are a lot of crackpots on the internet, and if you're going to get bent out of shape just because one of them calls your ideas stupid or inconsistent, you are going to be sad and frustrated 80% of the time. Shake it off. Spend your time developing ideas and trying to express them clearly, and then let those ideas speak for themselves. If someone else thinks the ideas are stupid, then it's their problem, not yours. Usually (although not always :) ) reasonableness wins over crankiness.