On Apr 13, 2005, at 3:12 PM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
At 12:06 PM Wednesday 4/13/2005, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
I don't see a difference, at least not a functional one, between the statements "The Iraq war is unjustifiable" and the *debate-style* "Resolved: The Iraq war is unjustifiable. Discuss."
How about, "In my personal opinion, the Iraq war is unjustifiable.
Here's why I believe that . . . YMMV, and I will respect you for your opinion even if it disagrees from mine, because I could be wrong."?
:D
<rant>
The point of taking that implicitly, as opposed to explicating it with every sentence, is twofold, I think.
1. Of COURSE that's how opinions should be read and responded to. Duh.
2. Such disclaimers, in addition to wasting time and effort (as they're already understood by any being capable of reason), resemble the crap you see at the ends of emails that say things like "This is a personal email and doesn't represent the views of BlaCorp..." and five more grafs of utterly worthless, totally unnecessary legalese tacked on by lawyers with far too much time on their hands and nowhere near enough real issues to tackle. (Or, more succinctly, beings incapable of reason. ;)
Why add more disclaimer than point to a discussion? "In my opinion, this thing is invalid, but of course I could be wrong and I'm open to discussion on the topic" ... kind of wordy if we can *presume* that the statement "this thing is invalid" is already an opinion and all the other verbiage associated therewith is understood to be applicable in all cases.
IOW, pissing and whining about a lack of disclaimers and qualifiers added to every! goddamned! opinion! is so much like behaving as a corporate attorney might that it's really offensive to the intelligence of the readers.
Isn't it?
Or should we behave as though everyone we correspond with is too stupid to grasp that when we write an expression of how we see or think, we're really just stating an opinion? Do we really truly need to label opinions as such, or can we safely assume all of our readers are bright enough to know where the opinions are?
Hey, here's a crazy idea. How about instead of attacking the way an idea is expressed, the idea itself gets to be the target of discussion for a while? It's nuts, I admit -- but it might just yield some interesting and meaningful results. Certainly it's not been tried around here much lately. Maybe then we'll see more light and less heat, huh?
</rant>
Here's a very short summation. I'm not going to change the way I express my opinions (nor the way I express myself in general) to suit the sensibilities of others.
Okay, how about the shorter version: "I could be wrong, but I think the war in Iraq is unjustifiable because . . . "
Of course, since it seems that the whole point of 99+% of such discussions on any topic, whether OL or in RL, is for the speaker to prove that s/he is right and that anyone who disagrees is wrong, as opposed to entertaining various possibly contrasting views and attempting to find the Truth or at least reach a consensus, admitting at the start that one might be wrong in one's opinion is counterproductive to the primary goal . . . :P
-- Ronn! :)
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