Reasonable Dissent

Who has the time?

Recently I’ve been mulling over a small disappointment that’s been growing for me. In one sense, I’ve very happy to have this site up. It’s great for me to write my thoughts down, and I like the feedback. Whether I deserve encouragement, criticism or to be kept in line, I can always count on the internet to sniff it out. I’m confident in what I believe, and part of that is to be open to new ideas and criticism. Getting myself out there has been a great experience so far, and I don’t intend to stop.

But, wow, there’s a bunch of garbage out here too, isn’t there? Sometimes I start to feel like the internet is such a double edged sword for what I want. It’s a huge forum for debate and the sharing of ideas, but it also is rife with fakes. By ‘fakes’ I mean people who pretend to want to discuss things, but have no intention of thinking about anything. Yes, my experience is biased, and this tends to manifest itself with creationists and fundamentalists for me. My guess is that in any subject this would be the case. What prompted this was a brief exchange I had with a blogger that goes by the moniker Makarios. I came across the site and found a post I wanted to comment on. We had a brief exchange, neither one really feeling like the issue was resolved (that’s ok, I didn’t expect us to), and I decided to try to keep going with this guy. Maybe, I thought, I could get to know him a little better by discussing stuff on his blog. And then I started noticing all the crap. It turns out that I came to the blog on a good day, but in general it’s full of atheist hate garbage. Several posts a day with titles like “Atheists can’t or won’t understand”, “Is talking to atheists hopeless?”, “Atheist stereotypes”, and so on. This guy had no real intention of debating anything. I happened on a post that wasn’t full of “every single atheist is an idiot” garbage… but it was by far the exception. And I realized that it just wasn’t worth my time to try to keep up with all the hate-spam.

Blogs tend to be themed, and mine is no exception. I understand that in such a context, it may look like someone has a single-track mind, but that’s not what is going on here. It kind of turned me off to the idea of looking for meaningful discussion on the internet (yeah, yeah, big surprise, I know). It’s disheartening to actually spend some time, think about things, research things, and prepare a meaningful discussion only to see the other side regurgitate canned arguments.

The most popular (by activity level, anyway) sites are the ones that are the most controversial. People love to scream at each other from anonymity. So how do you weed out the ones who have no intention of listening in the first place? Any suggestions for finding some real conversations with people who don’t agree with you?

Tags: debate