Arthur Webster   Just plain honesty
For all of my life I have been a straight talking and opinionated guy. As soon as I could talk I was the guide and commentator for my blind father and listened to his many long (friendly) arguments with his friends and neighbours.

I learned very early on that the last resort of the verbally incompetent is to say something like "You're full of it!" and precipitately end the argument. In those halcyon days of verbal sparring between men who, not so many years before, had been out "slaughtering the enemy or seeing their friends get slaughtered", it was impossible NOT to learn from every argument.

Very few people actually terminated arguments - they were the essence of life, itself. All around them, men saw contradictions and compromises and by some sort of osmotic process, they were absorbed into their way of thinking and behaving.

Where did it go?

What happened to this wonderful, free exchange of opinion and ideas?

From whence came these gormless, ignorant, apologists for everything under the sun that hints at a diversity of thought?

Look around many of these blogs.

Look around the blogs and forum streams in other communities.

Do you see reasoned (or even unreasonable) argument? Do you see the expression of a self formulated opinion by each participant? Do you see genuinely held or mischievously held ideas being promulgated in an atmosphere akin to verbal jousting? Do you feel that there are genuine arguments going on?

Generally. . . . . . . No.

Far too many people have been infected with the idea that PMA is the new, inviolable religion or mind set.

Far too many people are much too ready to take offense on behalf of somebody else - even though that somebody else was not offended.

Far too many people are infected with that well known and almost incurable sindrome - the knee jerk.

Far too many people do not express their opinions because they are afraid of what others, that they might look up to, might say.

There is nothing wrong with having a strongly held opinion, nor is there anything wrong with stating that opinion and emphasising it in any way that is commonly acceptable.

What is wrong, very, very wrong, is to express an opinion without the first idea of how to defend it or the willingness to debate it.

"You are so negative" is not an opinion - it is a mantra created through the very successful sale of millions of PMA bibles that do nothing but make the distributors rich and the readers incapable of independent, rational thought.

"You should not have said that" is not an opinion - it is the cowards way of saying "I disagree with what you said but don't know why". (It is OK to disagree without a reason, as long as you say so.)

These blogs lay bare everybody to the danger of exposing themselves to more knowledge, more practical help, more friends and contacts, achieving some sort of renown and, yes, more ridicule or disdain.

Isn't that what talking in a community is all about?

The spoken word cannot be taken back, the written word, whether written in angst or after cool deliberation, should not be taken back unless obscene.

What YOU think is what makes YOU special.

Why not let what YOU think make SOMEBODY ELSE special?
Apr 12th 2008 04:04