vindicated newbie wrote:

This post is illuminating. Assuming it was actually written by you (and if it's not I'm just gonna acknowledge the author), I'll grant you some of your statements for the moment.

Commander Tansin A. Darcos wrote:

I sort of realized that the simplest way to shut them down was to call them on their bullshit.

I don't think I'm done pointing out where you may have slipped into bad habits, if I'm to do a good job of it. Let's not end this prematurely. Let's be sure of ourselves.

If the beliefs of the group you describe are not produced by a process of reason, then they're here indulging in them because they get something out of it whether you confirm that belief or overturn it. The fact that you acknowledge it in any way with your responses gives the individual professing the belief something, whether it is entertainment or attention.

Ordinarily, people who are ideologically committed to an irrational idea can still benefit an audience because a rational individual can elevate a discussion into some form of debate and the audience, in observing the proceedings, will see the irrational beliefs from a useful perspective.

There's no audience of impartials or converts here, however. There's never likely to even be one; frankly your effort in altering search results for Caltrops such that it comes up high on the list when someone types in 'cretinous reprobates' just brings people that want to hang around exactly that, and it usually isn't going to be the most reasonable bunch. You, along with the rest of the board in their selective behavior toward newcomers, will ensure that any audience that arrives here and stays long enough to make any conclusions, is fairly committed to what you term an irrational belief structure. You've said as much yourself, and agreed with me there previously.

It must therefore follow that there will be no likelihood of anyone who isn't zealously committed to such a belief system will engage with you. The audience will contain nothing but irrational zealots.

Thus: there is nothing to shut down, but there is quite a lot to give acknowledgement and attention to, which entertains the people you're speaking to just fine.

That convinces me that you're justifying your stay; that the habit is still easy enough to slip into that you're not looking for a more polite and conversational bunch of curmudgeons to serve as a barometer for the behavior of the president or the speaker of the house, for a place with more uses than 'political barometer' and 'group that your input will disabuse of irrational thought.'

And we've already dispensed with the idea that the latter function really has any hope of working out at all, because this isn't a dialogue between people working from good faith (best case scenario for convincing anyone of anything rational by way of argument) or a dialogue between a scholar and a lunatic with an audience that will benefit from seeing the lunatic's lunacy exposed by a thorough scholarly approach (second-best case); we've instead used your own reasoning to expose that it is a crowd of raving lunatics who are not engaged by any product of your intellect, but only see your responses as granting attention to them and benefit from that attention - when one of them elicits a response, the rest are not engaged, but entertained, and the provocateur who elicited the response is entertained directly, as well as entertained in turn by further responses.

In light of this, you do more to shut them down by depriving them of the one thing they value from you - acknowledgement - by studiously saying nothing, because anything that's said will have its arguments transformed into entertainment value, content gleefully discarded for another round of bear-baiting. It is then nothing more than a bad habit to offer them argument because it is an impulsive attempt to correct a perceived fault in the world around you under the impression that it can be corrected at all, and bad habits die hard. I can understand what you're up against. Responding to posts you disagree with on Caltrops is probably as tempting to you with your urge to set things aright driving you on as the candy bars at the checkout line are to anyone who's fond of sugar, but ultimately neither activity appears to be particularly nourishing for anyone involved - except the insane. I suppose some sort of comparison can be made that's consistent with this view you've developed, something relating the problematic mindset of the Caltrops poster who seeks entertainment and an uneducated diabetic who shoves candy into themselves, seeking nourishment without aforethought, but ultimately both result in something ranging from a waste of time and energy to a harmful behavior.

What do you think?