--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_re...@...> wrote: <snip> > But it's the *consistent* content of FFL lately that > has been surprising me more. I haven't been post- > ing much because it's been rare to find a single > post to reply to that *wasn't* either an attempt to > start an argument or an attempt to perpetuate one.
This from the dude who has repeatedly boasted of posting *with the intention* of starting arguments. Not to mention that the majority of his posts aren't replies to anybody else's post, they're start-from- scratch rants. (Well, *recycled* start-from-scratch rants, anyway.) <snip> > And a few others make posts from time to time > that do not reek of boredom. But most stink to > high heaven of it. What Barry means is that *he* finds them boring. > Raunchy tries to avoid dealing with the boredom of > her life by fixating on women as victims, and by try- > ing to draw people into arguments about that. Shemp > does the same with global warming. Any number of > people run the same number with Maharishi. Judy's > so desperate for an argument that she'll pick one over > a 43-year-old pop song or the caste system she knows > nothing about. Heh. My post about the pop song was in response to *Barry* trying to pick a fight about it. And I'll note again that Barry can have no idea what my post about the pop song said, nor whether I know anything about the caste system, because, as he has told us over and over and OVER again, HE DOESN'T READ MY POSTS. Or Raunchy's, or Shemp's. > Climate change, politics, TM, even enlightenment -- > lately no subject seems to hold any actual *interest* > for the majority of FFL posters. One rarely gets the > impression that any of these subjects are anything > for most posters *except* an excuse to argue. It's intriguing that Barry feels engaging in argument about a topic equates to lack of interest in it. Most people would say the opposite: one tends to argue *only* about topics in which one is interested. Some might wonder, moreover, whether a person who claims to find argument boring is actually threatened by it, mocking it and declining to participate because he lacks confidence in his ability to make a case for his perspective, and is terrified of *losing* an argument and being shown to be wrong. Boredom, especially extreme boredom, is widely understood by psychologists to often be a manifestation of anxiety. One might expect that this is almost always the case when someone delivers loud proclamations about how bored he is-- or, perhaps even more likely, proclamations about how bored he perceives others to be--that don't actually make any *sense*, in which he declares to be boring things most others find to be of intense interest. Finally, another point Barry appears to be oddly unaware of is that engaging in argument often demands that one research the topic to learn more about it; and also that one continually refine and adjust one's case in response to the case of the party with whom one is arguing--hardly what one would want to do if one found the topic boring. But it might well seem undesirable to those who don't care about the integrity of their perspectives and don't wish to subject them to any challenge that might require refinement or adjustment.
