@snood,
Quote:My take on it is that the conservatives who post here approach discussions with a weird combination of defensiveness and smug cocksuredness that makes it impossible to even initiate, much less carry on a discussion.
That is a mode of discourse common to boards like this one. And people like Ann Coulter have set the mode. But it is the case that folks on the left, many of them, often write the same way. The resulting "contests" can be like two people standing on either side of a creek pissing on each other and then arguing about who is wetter. These are the sorts of people and discussions I ignore.
But there's an educational element in here as well. If you've been trained to write an argument or make a case carefully and understand the value of citations that steer a reader to source material, etc, then you'll usually do this whole "argument" endeavor differently than someone less educated. Roy is one of the educated sort.
After a Firing Line broadcast or maybe after a lecture, someone stood and, annoyed, asked Buckley why he used such big words. That's the educational divide here.