When I say "reasonable", I actually mean "rational", I don't mean compromising. In my opinion I was reasonable with @Oceander last night, in that IMO I was rational, but I damn sure didn't compromise with him; to his credit he's offered me an olive branch this evening which I've accepted, and I hope he and I will find some common ground somewhere, if not on this issue then on the next.
I do not have an issue with Oceander, except his position on this one issue. I do not consider him 'unreasonable' as a person, save this issue we obviously have no common ground upon which to stand. I admit to being a bit baffled, because where he and I agree is that no one can attempt to shame us into voting for someone we find reprehensible of character while constantly being cajoled and flicked with insults and ridicule because we refused to support someone we find unsupportable. I do not know how that exact framework doesn't translate itself into agreement when attempting to shame, ridicule and threaten our livelihoods by insisting we serve a behavior we find even more reprehensible than that of a politician lofted up as a paragon of virtue.
Others like our resident Leftist, I have absolutely no common ground upon which to stand and as has been exchanged, consider one another an enemy of every single thing the other holds dear in life.
So be it. I'm very happy to fight and get it over with.
But we can't fight the good fight and cut bullshit down to size by just yelling back and forth at each other.
Yes we can. I've done that for decades on various forums, including one I was a moderator of. I'm not going to stop now. I call things, ideas and positions what they are. I don't play games with allowing the heretical and the hostile to frame the debate and argument in the manners that advantage their use of Alinsky- tactics to achieve the shaming into silence and thus the total occupation of the ideological battleground.
We do actually have to listen and understand, and we have to distinguish when someone is explaining what they understand to be factual, from when they are advocating what they believe.
No. Wrong. We have virtually lost the Republic by that very mode of thinking, granting legitimacy and space to those ideas hostile and antithetical to the very existence of liberty itself. I do not care if they are True Believers in Democratic Marxism - I'm not granting the time to 'listen' to what they have to advocate - because that bullshit is already self-evident in the devolution of our culture and Republic into the Socialist Mobocracy we have become.
Someone needed to pop them in the face and tell them to back off and sit down a long ass time ago, BEFORE they ended up running the government, the courts and most of the cultural gates of mass media with impunity and abject contempt for anyone who does not embrace their 'remake' of society and government in their 'progressive' image.
People talk past each other because even this fundamental of reasoning seems to be overlooked.
You are welcome to keep talking Sam. I am past the point of wasting time reasoning with the unreasonable. Like any bully, talking merely delays the pounding they intend to visit upon you anyway. It's pointless and hands them legitimacy they do not deserve, because they are going to stab your ass in the back the moment they get the chance.
Light has no part with darkness, nor tyranny with liberty.
But we'll have to be reasonable ourselves in order to accomplish it.
Are you with me?
I'm past the point of extending olive branch petitions. You are welcome to go full John Dickinson and draft as many recipes of amity as sates a zeal of non-confrontation you may have. I think that course a failure as evidenced by the fact it does not a damn bit of good except empower and enable those whom are hell-bent on diminishing or eradicating liberty.
I'm a bit more Patrick Henry at this stage of our cultural collapse and takeover by tyrants. I'm of no mind to play nice with such.