uwot wrote: ↑Wed Oct 20, 2021 9:57 am
Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Wed Oct 20, 2021 6:35 am...He is a proven troll as I laid out above and I cannot determine whether he's doing so because he is retarded or playing some pretended game of war to create chaos.
Far be it from me to defend the Can man, he is in my view a deeply unpleasant individual, an opinion that, but for god Mr Can shares, after all:
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:54 pm...if I were an Atheist, I would know that no moral constraints remain upon we at all, and would very likely take full advantage of that fact, I think.
How anyone defines a troll is up to them, but I think Mr Can is just one of those bumpkins who confuses a valid argument with a sound one. Many people start with an irrefutable but unprovable premise, in Mr Can's case 'god exists', then create a coherent story based on it. Since the story is what Mr Can wishes to be true, it is all too easy for him to believe it. He lives in a world where twerps like William Lane Craig and lightweights like Alvin Plantinga make the same schoolboy error, but are taken seriously largely because they are saying stuff that some people wish to be true. In that environment, argumentum ad populum props up the piffle Mr Can spouts. Retarded is over cooking it, but it's more that than playing games I think.
You cannot argue with those knowingly lying to something both of you KNOW is a lie. The way he was blatantly denying the realities acts as a form of 'bridge' blocking where a troll prevents you passage without paying his extortion. I called it out correctly. He was lying for the sake of an audience.
I see a page up from this quoted response of yours (page 9?) that he is now attempting to isolate his prior indistinguished interpretation of "Common Ancestor Theory" and "man evolved directly from an ape theory" by pretending that I was NOW altering my position when I know the difference. Regardless of the fact that ONLY the religious had put the modern ape-to-man into Evolutionary theory by Darwin, he is intentionally maligning me as the one misunderstanding the difference! ??
And no, although I am arguing that he was TRYING to gaslight my position in his trolling, I am nor ever was in the least affected as though I were about to collapse to defeat in his favor. The definition of 'gaslighting' initially begun its use in describing the harmful affect it had on a victim of abuse within relationships. But given how politicians on the Right are adapting this in their rhetoric whereby the LISTENERS of the audiences of debate are the actual ones who are being gaslit, this sufficiently describes what the behavior is where no other better description fits.
I am reminded of a family member of mine who had a boyfriend that attempted to gaslight HER by faking a discussion with me on the phone in her presence. I had not talked to her in a long time before that and we were just beginning to make amend. But this guy did not like my presense in her life at all as I represented a threat to his means to successfully keep her in his power. He took advantage of our apparent means to repair things by pretending that he wanted to help her bring us to gether. So he asked to talk to me (although I had no will to do so.) Nevertheless, she fell for his apparent willingness to participate and handed him the phone to 'say hi'; but his intent was not to contribute but to stage a conversation with me as though I were responding to him. He begun at first to appear innocent in well wishing me but then begun to play a script of a conversation he was still having with me that didn't match anything I was saying. I could have hung up and he would still be completing his act for his intended audience, my relative. He then continued this hideous act as he begun to get more and more insulted by what he was pretending that I was saying about my relative and the circumstances that initially separated us. Then, threatened me for daring to insult her and, as though a defender in her honor, slammed the phone on me before I could have a chance to figure out what was going on.
Initially confused, I tried calling back to her directly only to be hung up denied BY HER because she seemed to have believed this fucker's con. I figured that if she believed this abuser over me, I too did not want to be involved with her and it maintained our separation to the day she died.
This is the kind of abuse that the present paradigm of Donald Trump's own use of this tactic is by intentionally faking the facts about what his opponents do no matter how absurd the lie. He was and still is effectively 'gaslighting'
his OWN base by maligning the opponents' positions. This is the same tactic that cult leaders use to isolate their followers from the effective arguments of outsiders because most people cannot believe that ANYONE would default to such actual direct lying. Instead, his followers are being INNOCULATED from even LISTENING to their leader's opposing positions out of a comparative faith that 'he (always) says it like it is' and thus he didn't seem capable of such overt deceit.
As for debating here with anyone philosophically, it is intentional manipulation to use this type of rhetoric because it only prevents ANY further logic to proceed. If the logic of the abuser's opponent is effective, the decision for them is to attack the premises. But where the premises are clear of their opponent, then the abuser targets their listening audience by "faking the conversation" in the way my relative's abuser did with her.
While fortunately, nobody seems fooled other than him here, to which I am greatful, it might NOT be so if I didn't clarify the tactics he was using. I also have to stop talking where I've presented my case in a way that is irrefutably understood by him because he is only defaulting to the abuse in spite of losing and continuing to argue only helps keep the appearance of his defeat unclosed. This keeps the debate alive as though it remains "controversial" when it isn't. I know he is intelligent enough and if he is merely reacting sincerely, he needs time to let it sink in. So everyone would be wiser to just stop counter-'baiting' him any further to prevent losing any ground gained.
I do get that you are trying to grant the charity for Immanuel Can by arguing as though he were just possibly 'mentally ill' in your own words but I don't think of him that way and believe that he is wise enough to handle my own level of intensity. I don't dislike him as a person and believe he respects me in kind regardless of how he is reacting.
[NOTE: To protect the integrity of those I speak of in my personal life, although it is awkward sounding, I opt to use 'relative' here rather than specifying this woman's actual relationship to me, as I do with others given that I am not anonymous here.]