(June 3, 2013 at 11:12 am)little_monkey Wrote: I agree with that. But my point was one of strategy. If you are sending a message to some people, or whatever the audience is, and you know that such words are going to be a distraction to these people, then it's just like shooting yourself in the foot.
I'm willing to be civil with someone who I know will try to engage me in an honest and genuine manner, because it seems like the polite thing to do. In that case, it's a person that isn't going to create a distraction if I use crude language, but who may lose interest in the discussion. In that case, use of foul language might have the effect you describe, and I think we're poorer for it.
On the other hand, I admit that I'm less concerned with people thinking I'm mean because I treated an idiot like an idiot.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
