[Official] The Vinny G. Thread

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

You don't get to decide when and where I engage you in good faith. I do.

You're a grown man. I expect more from you than I do from the others.

You're correct, in that you get to decide when you engage in good faith.

That you appear to choose to do so infrequently doesn't say good things about your character, IMHO.

I actually had hoped you were turning over a new leaf, because I think it's actually possible that you might have something interesting and thought-provoking to say. However, after seeing you alternate between calls for rationality and being a demonstrative proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, I have to say that my interest has waned.

I have no interest in attempting to have serious intellectual discourse with someone like that. It's not worth the effort.

No trolling, let's be real.

There was serious discussion going on. Nobody was even talking to you and jumped in and tried to troll the discussion.

And now you're talking to me about character?

You're like those anti-homosexuality Republicans who get caught diddling teenage boys. The best thing you can do is accept it and move on.

I know that was harsh, but you gotta admit it was true. And your post in that thread vouches for it.

I don't know about you, Vinny, but I've never had any difficulty having serious discussions here. I can't say that I've experienced what you claim to be experiencing. I'm active here and on one other forum, and I fault that other forum, vocally recently, for being entirely too lax and namby pamby. When I settled into these two forums, I originally avoided serious discussions because I found them unsatisfying; they had a tendency to devolve into an endless series of posturing and picking nits. As such, originally my preference was for that other forum, where the emphasis was on fun and frivolity, and serious discussions took a back seat. (I've also, recently, suggested that the quality of serious discussions there is lacking, because the protection of posters who can't compete in a serious discussion means you end up with a lopsided representation among the membership. Granted, that's just a theory, but for whatever reason, I find their serious discussions less satisfying than those here.) So I started out avoiding serious discussions, and spending a lot of time over there. Over the past six months, I find myself spending more and more time here, eclipsing the time I spend there, and it's the quality of the discussions which has a lot to do with that.

More, reading your posts of late, I see a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy; you want something to be true, so it becomes true. I've remained mostly silent in the face of it, but you, in my eyes, have a grossly distorted view of other people and what goes on here. I think this "perception" of yours may be contributing a lot to your apparent dissatisfaction here. Just suggesting that you're seeing what you want to see, and it's not necessarily there. Granted, I'm probably not the best witness; I'm very broad minded, and so likely interpret things more charitably than most; and because of my personality, I'm likely to flourish regardless of the environment, so maybe I see things as rosier than they are. (I'm reminded of the studies of self-esteem in which they found that teams with high self-esteem won more games; in retrospect, their higher self-esteem seemed to be the result of them winning a lot of games, not the cause of it.)

I think you've got a big chip on your shoulder, and a bag full of preconceptions about how people are going to behave, and how they are going to treat you, and surprise, you end up seeing exactly what you expect to see.

I personally could care less whether you come or go. But don't pretend that just because you say things are one way that that necessarily means they are that way.

You're simply not that prescient. And this will be said sooner or later, so I'll say it now. I think your arguments are crap. I think you're a terrible reasoner. I say this not just to dig on you but to point out the real possibility that you're not that bright, and that perhaps many of your conclusions may be (are) wrong. The key point here is, this isn't just limited to the deductions and inferences you make about Bayes theorem or the Cosmological argument, it also afffects your ability to come to valid conclusions about the social world around you. I think many of your complaints are ultimately sourced there, in your inability to draw sound and robust conclusions about your social environment.

Perhaps there are a lot of people you've angered, and perhaps they have an active dislike of you. I'm not going to take a poll. But your theories about why this is, or why the people on this forum behave the way they do are much the same as your other theories. They're crap.

Granted, I could be wrong. About a lot of things. But atheists a lot smarter than you and me vouch for what I believe.

But I'm supposed to think I'm wrong, and really respectable intellectuals like Graham Oppy and Quentin Smith are wrong because....some Grover City community college graduate with an associate's degree in carpentry says so on an internet forum? Forgive me for being skeptical, pops.

And even if I am wrong, am I supposed to be convinced by "OMG THATS STUPID", "UR AN IDIOT", "CATHOLIC SPIES DID IT", "UR ARGUMENT IS LAME"? Perhaps your broad-mindedness could see it fit to determine that responses like this don't entirely convince me of wrongness.

I won't even stop there. Since you've said I am wrong, and you know I am wrong, I invite you, no- I dare you, to explain to me precisely how I'm wrong. We can tally it up, and at the end give out cash and prizes based on your success.

Just not in this thread, because I foresee a long and stimulating discussion with you that deserves its own thread. Would you like to prove me wrong?