US Politics Feedback Thread - Page 24

LegalLord, by now, I really think I've seen you spend about equally long explaining why you consider responding to kwizach is a waste of time as I have seen you respond to kwizach. Once again, it's totally fair that you don't want to engage, his previous monster was a lot to even read, not to mention crafting a reply to. Nobody expects scholarly work from forum posts.

But that doesn't mean we should discourage it.. The fact of the matter is, the thread functions on several different levels. There's the 'youtube video - look at this shocking footage' - which is largely dismissed as garbage, even if not (at least currently) actionable by itself. Then there's the stealthblue-article - opinion pieces or news articles relating to current events - I assume many people just skim these, but sometimes they kickstart discussions, sometimes the sources are good, sometimes more objectionable. Still, these are mostly productive and certainly help start discussions. Some of these articles (and stealthblue is far from the only poster providing these) are even genuinely interesting and well-written- while I rarely agree with the content, I frequently enjoy reading articles posted by Danglars.

Then you have kwizach and Lord Tolkien, who provide genuinely scholarly sources.

I'm not a big fan of academic writing, or reading. Frankly, I prefer just spouting off my opinion without having to provide citations, and I prefer reading people whose insight is so obvious (or their world views so in line with my own ) that they hardly have to provide any. I think writing academic texts is a boring chore. But I also think academic writing represents the highest level of information possible, and the information from scholarly sources is on average much more trustworthy than that out of any other information outlet. When people like me or farvecola compliment kwizach's posts it's because we really enjoy it when the thread provides insight which normally is somewhat inaccessible - I don't have the mental stamina to read academic article after academic article, but I'm really grateful when someone either condenses information from several academic articles or links me particularly relevant pieces.. If you feel it's a sort of shitposting ganging up against you, that sucks, but it's pretty unfounded; I just know from experience that whenever I've written long posts and someone writes 'great post thanks for taking the time to type out all that' or some variant thereof, it makes me happy and motivates me to write more long posts that I spend an hour+ articulating. I also know that writing a super long post and getting 0 responses is demotivating.

Once again, I'm not expecting you to address his monster post; but the way these rehashed discussions has looked to me is basically;
LegalLord posts something about russia/nato/foreign policy. To me, it mostly seems sound - I'm not a scholar, you speak with confidence, you certainly know some things and bring up some valid points.
Then Kwizach or Lord Tolkien writes a rebuttal. It's long. Responding to all the points made would take a long time, and for me, quite a bit of self-educating before I could contest the points they are making. I think wow, these guys really know what they're talking about, I assume whenever there's a contradiction between LL and LT/KZ, the latter is probably more accurate than the first claim.

But then, the same thing happens, over and over again. And I see you rehash your point about kwizach being impossible to argue with more than I see either you or kwizach arguing. It's much like how you've recently started posting about how everyone spouted on about Hillary being 'so electable' way more frequently than that being cited for a reason for her actually getting the nomination, in fact, a certain poster linked you a poll showing that this wasn't really an accurate depiction of why people supported her, which you ignored. At some point, I find myself thinking that it would have been much easier for you to just go like, 'hey, I'm sorry but I'm not gonna bother having this discussion with you, I don't feel like you've been entirely genuine when discussing and it feels like a massive waste of time, people can choose to believe what you post or what I post, that's up to them, but I just wanna say that I think the misrepresentation of my opinions is not really fair, I just didn't want to put in the effort of an academic text and I assumed people weren't gonna deliberately twist my text to make me look ignorant', and that would've been completely fair - sympathetic even. But now you more come off as having a grudge, and it's kinda petty.

I can also see the irony in this being like the third time I'm making this post. But frankly I think it's good if kwizach spends his time lending his FP expertise rather than getting involved in some petty discussion around what type of posting is more preferable to the thread, especially as it's kinda tough to be a fair arbiter of anything you're personally involved in. And I think it's good for everyone if you stops attacking him. Nobody forces you to respond. However, when you do respond, and largely through attacking his posting style (I don't care whether it's true that 6 discussions ago you genuinely tried to address his points), I just have to vocally disagree, because the type of contributions his previous monster post constitutes, even if 90% of the thread literally went too long I'm not reading that, are imo immensely valuable.