And that's why you'll continue to be ignorant.
I get this response over and over when in the middle of a discussion someone says something I've already addressed in a blog post (or several) and I link to it so the explanation can be laid out in detail. Yes, I could type it all out again, or I could copy and paste the whole post, but why?
Well, one reason to do so is that most people seem to refuse to read a blog post that applies to the situation. That seems odd to me. I've never refused to read anything sent to me to explain someone else's position or beliefs. Not once. If it's especially long, I may skim it-- but I have never "yelled" at anyone for sending a link, whether to a blog post or an article, yet that happens to me all the time.
I suppose the difference might be that I always want to know if I'm wrong. If there's a valid point that I'm missing that bolsters the other side (or destroys my side), I want to be aware of it. It may or may not change my mind-- to do so it would have to present something new that I hadn't already considered-- but I still want to know what the arguments for the other side are.
So many others don't seem to think the same way. It seems this is because they would rather make claims, not a case for what they are saying.
Recently, after a guy attacked someone for observing that cops are a threat, I spelled out-- carefully and completely-- to him why there are no "good cops" and why there can't be. He really balked when I posted a link to something relevant I had written before on the topic, telling me he didn't care what someone had written in a blog. All he could manage was to was claim, over and over again, that there are good cops (because one had helped him once) and tell me it wasn't a "hegemony" (not sure how that applied to my observation that police are a criminal gang) and that I was using false equivalencies and straw men.
But he never even tried to address or refute my points or to make some of his own, even admitting that taxation is theft-- but he'll accept it because it funds police. (He is also a "Constitutionalist", so that might be part of the hangup.) It was just too obvious to him that cops are the only thing keeping us from all killing each other-- using the chaos in gun-free utopian cities that "defunded police" [sic] as his evidence. When I pointed out that this is the inevitable result in places that violate the right to own and to carry weapons, with or without cops. he threw around his favorite words some more and refused to stop and think.
I have figured out that most people simply don't go through the same mental process that I do when evaluating something. That's not wrong, even if it's different, but it means they'll never be convinced in the same way I have been convinced. If they are to be convinced, it's going to take someone whose brain works more like theirs does. That's not me.
