liam's picture
Sun, 11/11/2007 - 1:12pm — liam

There are some worthwhile thoughts on the patterns of people arguing with each other on the internet here at unfogged.

…What I really want out of an argument is clarity: I want people to know exactly what I mean, and to know exactly what they mean, and to be able to state clearly in which regards we agree and in which we disagree. I don’t like unexamined comity.

I think this attitude freaks people out on a lot of issues, particularly but not exclusively gender issues. There are areas where people think that your position on a set of issues defines you as a “Good Person” or a “Bad Person” (there are, of course, areas where that’s really true – I’m mostly thinking in this argument that people are being fuzzy in how they think about it), and they want to be on the “Good Person” side of the argument. And they see people standing roughly on the “Good Person” side of the argument (say, opposing torture), and really want to come out of any discussion affiliated with the “Good Person” side of the discussion.

Now I know that I have a terrible fixation for endless internet arguments with other people, up to and including a bit of mutual abuse. Maybe that appetite for perversity itself makes me a Bad Person, I don’t know. The pattern of internet argument that’s always infuriated me most isn’t that participants assert individual moral qualities to their opponents, Good or Bad, because that’s really only an enjoyable way of collapsing an argument that’s probably gone on too long. No, the most frustrating act of internet bastardry is the act of attributing individual goodness or badness to somebody’s willingness to keep arguing.

I mean, it’s a joyful thing to dispute. I hold that truth to be self-evident—and if you’re one of stoush.net’s rather small group of frequent readers, I think you do too. If you think like me (and if you don’t, of course, you’re a useless fucking arse-clown) you’ll agree that it’s not a moral failure to despise consensus and want to thrash out particular arguments fully, even if it means feelings get hurt. To restrain conversations to protect the egos of participants is to infantilise them.

Let’s all spend a little bit of time in the next week or two of the Federal election really getting to know the people we’re arguing with, and doing a bit of arguing with people and positions we’d probably ordinarily agree with, by sincerely and truthfully calling them arse-clowns.