[quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:98, topic:44368”]For some utterly inexplicable reason I was picturing this happening between Richard Scarry anthropomorphic animal characters. (And the cop was a badger rather than the stereotypically more obvious pig.)
Sorry about that.[/quote]
Never apologize for being awesome. He’s more like a fox or weasel than a badger, though. The next time we have one of our showdowns I am going to do my best to imagine him as a Richard Scarry-esque weasel cop.
… are not infrequently agent provocateurs working for the opposition. So it’s sad to read their success in causing online in-fighting … 
Well spoken.
Speaking about on-line discussion, my opinion is that we need to replace the blog with a better means to focus in and address exactly the part of a comment or article that we want to address. Now, most on-line venues do not do as much as even what is available here to facilitate that directed reply, and most people do not use what tools are available because they are used to not having them most of the time. Sites like Reddit and Slashdot have contextual tools for replies, Facebook, and most other sites do not, but people don’t use these tools very much, even when they are available, because they are not in the habit of thinking of making a directed reply.
Since people do not reply in context, they allow for abuse to happen in conversations, they allow for topic hijack and driving trollies to have a much bigger effect than they should. Both can be contained by directed replies and possibly additionally by forking the conversation into a new thread or subthread.
I argue that it is the blog that has done more to degrade communication than anything else.
I was not just asking within the context of an online discussion, but in society overall.
People have talked past each other for well before the internet came along.
What if talking past each other is actually just the most efficient way to deal with our collective problems?
I just read the whole thread and I can’t find it now, but someone said that maybe the reason has something to do with people posting as a performance for others rather than posting as a way to actually connect with the person they disagree with. Person A says X, Person ~A says ~X, not to convince A or learn something about X or figure out the disagreement, but to try to win the favour of B and C. What if that is actually just the purpose of public forums? What if reaching an understanding was never part of the equation at all?
I don’t think we are individually intelligent or useful. If anyone of us didn’t exist things would pretty much be as they are now (I don’t mean if we ceased to exist at this moment - that would disrupt a lot of routines).
I don’t think talking past each other is new, so I’m pretty sure that a broad tendency to talk past each other has so far resulted in all human accomplishments. I guess my question is what is the purpose of this thing that I think I am that engages in these conversations to begin with? Is it actually important to the functioning of humanity that those parts of our brains that exist to think about ourselves actually connect with other parts of brains that think about themselves? If it isn’t, then maybe talking past each other is a feature instead of a bug, or maybe it just doesn’t matter whether we do it or not.
Have to say, GIFT seems to have been disproven by the experiment of forcing everyone to use real names on youtube. It made the comments even worse. Jerkish behaviour (and even some outright illegal things) on the internet is not related to anonymity, and allowing anonymity might actually encourage it since it removes many thoughtful people who do not wish to be identified for thoughtful reasons. Ultimately the problem with GIFT may be that “Normal Person” is already the same thing as “Total Fuckwad.”
Thus I put “Human nature” right above.
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