@glitterbag,
Quote:Well, I have a great deal of respect for the women who sing your praises.
So do I, and they also sing your praise…
Quote:I did go back to the beginning to see what I must have missed. At least 7 different members asked for clarification on your observation, but I didn't see anyone have their question answered in a civil manner.
That is incorrect. I could not understand what bobsal was saying, but I provided all the clarifications I could, in a civil manner to Joe from Chicago, who had cogent respectful questions that I tried to answer to the best of my ability.
BTW, Joe and neologist were entirely right: my original statement was too narrow and poorly phrased. It wrongly excluded logic from the sources of knowledge, something I corrected later on in the thread, and the word “observe” is apparently not used colloquially in English to describe introspection. I could rephrase my original statement as:
Since I define knowledge as based on a combination of logic and facts (with each elements being necessary but not sufficient by itself), and since gods are by definition neither bound by facts (they can hide in the netherworld) nor reason (they can allegedly follow very odd logic or no logic at all), it follows that gods cannot really be known. So the phrase that Frank wrote on A2K about 10 million times – I don’t know if gods exist or not -- is a truism, a tautology: it is true by virtue of how the terms of the sentence are defined. And tautologies, while true, don’t need to be repeated 10 million times.
That sums up my beef with Frank. The same argument can be made with the half-dozen other platitudes he constantly offers as great wisdom on philosophy threads. The reason I find his mindless repetitions of platitudes objectionable, is not only that it clutters threads and kills them in the egg, but also that it’s meant as an
insult: it is used to imply that other posters are too stupid to understand a platitude; they just don’t get it, you see? So they need to hear it again and again…
Quote:I will say that the first response I got from you was reasonable, you even admitted you felt a pang of guilt and was only doing this because you were bored. OK, that's fair, but very quickly it switched to GB is siding with Frank, you refashioned my comments as if insulted you, I'm a crack poodle, I'm hysterical and a few other unflattering attributes.
Your beef with the thread in principle was a good point. The thread title is a harmless prank, but it was indeed in poor taste and I regret it. I shouldn’t have mentioned Frank’s name in it. If you had kept your criticism at that, you would have won the exchange. Your early punches were solid. But you went into allegations and then later insults which made you look increasingly foolish and out of control.
You forgot rule number 1 in battle threads: never lose your cool. It remains a game, so never take yourself too seriously or you gona look like an out-of-control freak who can’t take pressure, has a problem with free speech, needs to take his medication, to get over himself, etc. Whatever the stakes and the issue at hand, a cool dude will always win over a drama queen. It’s a game that requires self-control, just like real-life debates do.
I was pretty pissed-off at you too at some point and drafted a few shrill messages myself, then scraped them. The worse internet pirate has got to go by some rule, and I can’t trash a woman... Too vulgar, even for me, so I pulled my punches. That’s what saved me this time around.
Quote:I begged off but you couldn't let it go.
Did you, really? I thought you were kidding.
The message you qualified as an “olive branch” was full of scorn. After that and the 2 posts before it -- and all the ones before where you “called BS on me” and “asked for a show of hands” -- how could I possibly conclude that you genuinely wanted to mend fences???
I look forward to this topic every day! 
