@hawkeye10,
Quote: People ignore for reasons of their own, for many different reasons. Hillary ignores anything that she does not want to deal with, ignores that which would make her confront her own preconceived ideas which may be wrong ideas, and many others do also.
This is part of why Ignore harms the dynamics of debate.
Others ignore because they are sure that the speaker is an idiot,
however they should know that even the idiot is right some of the time.
Other ignore because they have limited interests, though it is in the collectives interest to encourage them to learn about new things. And so on.
The ignore function at a2k is in place to empower the individual,
it however works against the a2k collective in the long run.
I believe that empowering the individual is a
GOOD THING.
I say this with confidence that I will be Ignored more ofen than most A2Kers.
(That has probably already happened; there is nothing rong with that; I begrudge it to no one.)
I remember that (not so much here, as back on Abuzz) there were some folks
who were recidivisticly, chronicly and heatedly belligerant & vituperative,
in furtherance of their respective ideologies; both sides of the political spectrum
were guilty of this. I felt embarrassed when some hostile lunatic on
MY side
disgraced us with his mindless acrimony.
It can be painfully unpleasant to engage in conversation conspicuous victims
of mental disturbance, who are chronicly irate & malevolent
in their ubiquitous authoritarian denunciations. Doing this entails unnecessary unpleasantness.
As a hedonist, I see no reason to put up with it.
The probability of learning something in (some of) those cases was so remote
as to justify ostracism. I used to inflict what I called "Abuzz Capital Punishment"
upon such pariahs, which simply meant that I stopped reading their posts.
That caused them to instantly disappear from my world.
The same principles of reasoning apply here, Hawkeye.
David
