A list of reasons why I’ll give up talking to you about your moral or political beliefs

[feotakahari]

 This list goes from most to least crippling to my ability to say anything intelligent in response. It does not include intentional trolling, only seemingly sincere reactions to which I can say nothing.

1): The subject matter, in and of itself, makes you so angry that I can’t discuss it. For instance, I once encountered someone who described evolution as his “berserk button,” by which he meant that he saw the concept of evolution as inherently and enragingly disrespectful to the perfection of God’s creation. I couldn’t even say the word without pissing him off.

2): You make mental connections in a way that doesn’t match most people, AND you assume everyone else is like you. On the same site, I encountered a fellow who ranked all his moral values in absolute and unchanging order. For instance, if he were to rank honesty more important than kindness, he would deny that there was ever a possible situation in which it was more important to be kind than to be honest. He had no way of understanding that other people didn’t do this, and he’d somehow concluded that making equality an important value would lead to genocide, so any attempt to discuss equality with him would only frighten him with the thought of the genocide I would surely be committing any day now.

3a): You’re starting from basic moral premises that don’t match mine. I’ve never directly spoken to this person, but I’ve seen posts about a person whose only moral principle is that creations owe absolute obedience to their creator. God is the creator of everything, so anything God does is by definition right, disobeying God is by definition wrong, and there exists no higher moral standard than whether God approves or disapproves of something. In theory, I could argue the point by creating my own arguments for what God approves of or disapproves of, but I barely ever think about what God approves of or disapproves of, so he would easily out-argue me through his greater experience in the subject matter.

3b): You bit the bullet so hard it snapped in half. In an argument over abortion rights, I cited the example of a woman whose fetus is already dead and rotting inside her. Someone responded that they still wouldn’t approve of abortion, because God might work a miracle. It’s absurd, but it’s self-consistent, and it forms an unbreakable wall no logic can penetrate.

4a): Your anecdata goes against my argument, and it’s very emotive in nature. For instance, you might base all your arguments about illegal immigration on the anecdote of an illegal immigrant who raped and murdered a teenage girl. I could easily produce a counterexample in the form of an illegal immigrant who did not rape and murder a teenage girl. With a bit of research, I might be able to argue that illegal immigrants who rape and murder teenage girls are a statistical minority. But it’s easy for you to argue that my defenses of illegal immigrants are disrespectful to the teenage girl who was raped and murdered, and any response I could make to this validates the idea that “respect” is the most important factor in the argument. (Even fighting fire with fire, like bringing up an illegal immigrant who was raped and murdered, achieves nothing.)

4b): Your scientific studies go against my argument, and I have no ability to argue that your studies are inaccurate or poorly designed. This is the approach that hits me the hardest, because I rarely know enough to evaluate whether my own pet studies are any better. Either or both of us could be arguing based on sham science, and I’d never be able to tell. This leaves us at a standstill as I politely bow out of the conversation. (On the other hand, if I can tell that your study is poorly designed, I get madder and madder as I try to explain the issue and you tell me I’m just a science denier who doesn’t know when to quit.)

5): I don’t understand how your conclusions logically follow from your stated premises. Let’s go back to example 2 for a moment. This person once told me that, because bottle-fed infants have lower IQs than breast-fed infants, gay men should not be allowed to adopt children. There are clearly a lot of unstated premises involved in that conclusion, but I have no idea what they are, and trying to puzzle them out confused me so much that he won the argument easily. (I’ve started to get better at asking exactly what the missing premises are, but this just makes people angry instead of making them explain.)

I don’t have a conclusion or a solution for this list. But I’d say it covers a good seven-tenths of my arguments on the Internet, and that’s making me run out of steam faster and faster.