the double standard is once again obvious as in the Greg-Nielsio conflict Stef exactly kept repeating that the discussion should be about the truth of Greg's statement and not about his snarky tone.

also, given the ease with which FDR'ers feel attacked or insulted they have a perfect way of not having to engage in discussions about topics that are difficult for them

you encounter somebody who insults you or who is snarky or whatever you should do both: answer the intellectual part of his question and call him on his tone

What an awesome way to shield themselves off from criticism.

"I don't like your tone you clearly aren't in search of truth. Good day sir"

Hypothesis: Thanks to Stef's new ....whatever....FDR will get even more odd and culty since they have found a new way to go around rational critiques of their position.

Oh, I have experienced it first hand myself. Stef's response to my 2nd ever post at FDR was...

Stef' wrote:

I don't debate with people who talk to me like that.

If I had taken his advice, I wouldn't have responded to his first response to me at all. He was snarky and dismissive. He responded to a long post with 2 lines that had absolutely nothing to do with what I asked. I guess if I was "in tune with my inner philosopher", I would have just told him that I don't appreciate being dismissed, and dropped my original argument all together.

I tried using Stef's "real-time relationship" advice with him, and he friggin blew up on me.

Can't link you but the thread is called "FDR596 Biology and Sexuality - A Rebuttal"

Wow...so, no response for over a month now. I guess he really did think that a topic to which he devoted two podcasts wasn't very important. This did make me laugh, though...

Quote:

Filed under: gay

http://freedomainradio.com/board/forums/permalink/93438/94312/ShowThread.aspx#94312
this is where Stef becomes vile and accusing.










Well I had no problem with your opinion - I agree that people can have homosexual experiences as a result of trauma.
I did believe that you need to provide evidence for your criticisms of the science, and still do.
You're clearly not gay, so your personal experiences don't bear on the science.
I did feel that you had an emotional block to objective thinking in this area, and still do. Your above post confirms this, for me - for instance:

• You still don't think that you need to provide scientific evidence to counter scientific evidence, and portray my request for such evidence as some sort of manipulative trick.
  
• You did not reveal your personal stake in the issue until asked, which was not exactly forthcoming.
  
• You now seem upset that no one wanted to get into a discussion with you - wherein you provided no evidence and had a hidden agenda at the beginning.
  

No one owes you a response here, or anywhere else for that matter, just as no one owes me a response. If people don't want to debate with you, blaming them is immature.

I truly appreciate that this is a very difficult subject for you - we can either talk honestly and openly about your emotional discomfort with homosexuality, or you can get mad because people don't seem to want to get sucked into some tangential and emotionally-charged discussion about largely irrelevant topics.
It's your choice of course...



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Filed under: gay

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[url=][/url] 10-15-2007, 8:22 AM
94330 in reply to 94312

• reddeerrick
  
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• Joined on 02-28-2006
  
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Re: FDR596 - Biology and Sexuality - A Rebuttal



Reply Quote






I appreciate that nobody owes me a response, which is why I was willing to back off - until I heard the podcast.
I am willing to agree that my personal experiences, and yours, don't bear on the science, so lets just look at the science.
My main point is and always has been that you have made a claim on this topic based on a scientific report which I think is logically flawed, and I have given the reasons why I think this. There are also political agendas associated with this research. Is it not your burden to support your claims more than it is mine to offer counter claims?

To reiterate, the scientific report consists of 2 main points:
1. A correlation between anomalously gendered brain structures and homosexual behavior. How it is that this type of brain structure is detected in adults is not explained, nor are any statistical data, such as sample size, provided. All that aside, the fact is that correlation does not prove causality, so nothing is really proven here.
2. Animal tests show that the sexual behavior of rats can be altered by manipulating hormone levels. This kind of research, of course, is a rather extreme form of "Begging the Question" and is thus logically invalid to my mind. What do you think?

A sympathetic board member sent me a PM with a link to an online book, one chapter of which deals with an objectivist view of homosexuality. Of course, as in all objectivist writings, there is a logical leap in the area around the is/ought dilemma, which causes the author to make the absurd claim that homosexuality is both immoral and a non-issue. But aside from that, I think he makes some pretty solid arguments, and if you would like to accept this as my counter-evidence, please give it a read.
By the way, I'm a little surprised that you now consider this to be an "irrelevant topic", since you clearly didn't think so a few months ago when you made the podcast.

btw, I know of at least 5 people who are convinced that Stef is gay.

also, the fact that Stef did not feel attracted to Christina (and vice versa) the first time that he knew her may be telling. They've sort of had to work on that, which may be odd in and of itself but also would go counter to his claims in this thread

Back to the original post: I think that the "real time relationship" is only valuable if you have a certain goal. If you are debating someone with the goal of learning about the topic at hand (or with a similar goal, such as convincing someone about your side of the issue, or explaining it, or educating people about it, etc.), then real time relationship is a hindrance. If your goal in a debate is to feel happy at all times during the debate (and perhaps also to make your debate partner feel happy), then real time relationship tactics sound like they'd work very well.

I rarely debate anyone but almost every time I have, my goal has been to discuss the issue, not to stay happy or make friends or strengthen my relationship with my debate partner. I don't think a debate is a good environment for those things; I think a debate is a good environment to discuss a topic or issue, and rebut claims, and further truth.

are you familiar with John Taylor Gatto's work? he's a former 'public school teacher of the year' who after retirement (and many horrible experiences in public schools) started to investigate the history and purpose of public schooling and wrote The Underground History of American Education

check this funny and interesting interview that Scott Horton did with him

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

Quote:

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

Both Mencken's quote and Gatto's interview are brilliant. I wonder, though, at their efficacy in effecting change (is "efficacy in effecting" redundant?). I understand and agree completely, but I already did. How many people who believe in the system are apt to change their minds - or even begin to change their minds - after hearing these ideas? I hope at least some.