Another School Shooting, this time in Florida

[ORCACommander]

Fuzzy Ultimately there is no point in life but that which you define for yourself. We live, we consume resources, procreate ourselves senseless and then die. it is the rare person who gets to leave a lasting mark upon our mortal plane

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Yeah yeah. I covered existentialism in high school English class. -___-

I'm talking about what is the frelling point of continuing a conversation that will not move anyone, that will not even bear a token concession. What is the point of raising my blood pressure and increasing my alcohol consumption?

...please don't test me.

[Robovski]

Why should we concede anything? You haven't convinced us of anything and you seem ill-informed on the subject.

[AllanO]

Fuzzy Necromancer "I'm talking about what is the frelling point of continuing a conversation that will not move anyone, that will not even bear a token concession. What is the point of raising my blood pressure and increasing my alcohol consumption?"

In my experience the nature of humans is that singular debates rarely move them on entrenched issues, if we were debating how to calculate the air speed velocity of an unladen European swallow a debate might result in some changes in individual positions if no one had preconceived notions, but once you have entrenched positions for reasons of group politics and individuals people become resistant to change (even in scientific debates these sorts of intransigence develop often enough). People may say I believe X because of Y, but if you then show them not Y, they more than likely say well I did not mean X because of Y, I meant X because of Y' and so on.

In terms of convincing people who disagree with you, your inability to get much movement from the people debating you, is about as meaningful as their inability to get much movement out of you.

Still part of holding a position is that you occasionally defend it. So at best a debate is probably going to let you lay out your arguments and gain understanding of each other, provide a little food for thought, that over months or years may change minds along with the rest of accumulated experience and thought, but no guarantees and no real satisfaction. People who change their mind will usually forget they ever thought anything different (or heavily downplay it). Still your arguments (and those like you) presumably add a little give and take into the slow process by which views evolve and so contribute to the debate, of course part of that process is the way your position is modified by exposure to other arguments. Hopefully there is some drift towards sound position and actions.

One potential benefit of these sorts of debates is understanding what other people's position actually is. However the practical benefits of this are less in terms of changing anyone's mind (or even figuring out what would change people's mind) and more in understanding what the landscape of people's beliefs are (what actions or changes will meet with more or less resistance).

[Steve]

I'm personally in favor of gun rights while maintaining common sense gun control limits (to ensure people don't just go out and get a gun to blow someone away, or themselves), but I have to say, I'm also a bit miffed with how Emma Gonzalez and Nicholas Hogg and co have been treated.

I have no issue with criticizing what they say. We are, after all, under no obligation to agree with them, no matter what they went through.

But instead of addressing their arguments, too many gun rights advocates seem to take an almost perverse joy in launching strawman and ad hominem attacks on them. Instead of critiquing their arguments, they are attacked as people. They're being photoshopped as tearing up the Constitution, or for wearing the flag of the country their family came from (well, let's be honest, it's one survivor in particular who gets targeted, and she is conveniently A) the girl and B) the Latina, and not just Latina, but Cuban-American, so everyone gets to play up the paranoia about COMMIES). And these kinds of tactics don't make them look confident and capable, they reek of ideological desperation. As if they realize they're going to lose the debate so they're grabbing desperately at anything, any straw of argument they can find, to hold back inevitable defeat. And in the process, they even start to look like the bullying man-children treating deadly weapons as penile compensation artifacts that the gun control activists claim their adversaries are.

[excalibur]

Perhaps people from both extremes are the ones making all the noise.

I want to pick a middle of the road but my personal belief is that there is a limit in how much compromises can be done before it is in direct violation of our rights