lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I mean, of course there's the possibility that I might overlook something or misunderstand something. That's always a possibility for anyone, so the question is pretty irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant, it leads to a follow up questions.
Pretty open ended though, isn't it?
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Like I said, I'm not starting at a conclusion. One leads to another, that's pretty obvious. So if you do believe there is a possibility that you might overlook something or misunderstand something, why is your stance always that you haven't but it was everyone else that did?
That's not my stance though. My stance is that if *you* believe that I have misunderstood something that you said, then it is *your* job to point that out and correct me. I'm not going to play 20 questions trying to guess what you think I missed. That's pretty stupid, isn't it?
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Your answer isn't consistent with your actions.
Of course it is. You say something. I respond to it. You suggest that I misunderstood what you said. I ask you to clarify. You demand that I must guess. I tell you no. See how that's perfectly consistent?
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gbaji wrote:
You make statements and ask questions which are not intended to be taken at face value, but are intended to imply some other claim you are making.
I've never denied that I am vague or subtle. It's part of my job, remember? Amongst a lot of other things, your tax dollars paid for me to learn how to interrogate people.
Yes. So you should know that the correct response to an interrogation is to never answer leading questions. Never guess at what the other person is saying. And never ever ever offer any information other than that specifically asked.
I demand that you be specific because I'm smart enough to realize what you're doing and am unwilling to play your game. You get that right?
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Asking leading questions is part of that. Yes, they're subtle and vague. They have to be. "Are you guilty" does actually work sometimes, but only on people that know there's no way out and they've given up. Even then they still lie. That's not exactly a revelation that you've uncovered, though. I've mentioned I'm military police, and that I do investigations. I know this because it came up during one of the DADT threads.
Yes. And I'm sure your techniques work great on some people. Congrats, I guess?
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However, I've never once been accused of being so vague and subtle that, as you've said multiple times, no one could decipher the meaning. Which is an odd anomaly, because again, it's based on interrogations: I can't be so vague or subtle that the person I'm speaking with can't understand. That ruins cases, and drags interrogations on for-freakin'-ever, and even more paperwork.
See. Now you're fibbing. Of course you can be that vague and subtle. As you just said above, the best way to get someone to say something you want them to say is to ask questions so vague that they will fill in what they think you know. If you make specific allegations and he thinks you can't prove them, he'll deny what you said. If you leave things vague, he'll often provide you with information you would have missed if you'd been more specific.
That's great for interrogation, but not so great for a conversation about something like in this thread. Which I why I always kinda shake my head when you do this. I'm not being interrogated here. If you want to know something, ask. I'll give you an answer.
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Like I said, I'm trying to figure out how you can constantly insist that I'm too vague and subtle that no one can understand.
Because you are? Do I need to go back and quote you? You said something. I responded. You didn't say "You misunderstood me. I meant this: ... ". You just said "Can't you accept that it's possible you misunderstood me?". And you don't see how that's you being vague? The implication of your response is that I misunderstood something, but if I ask you if that's the case, you refuse to answer. You then stated that I should figure it out on my own. Which in this context means you want me to write down every possible thing that you might have meant instead of what I thought you meant.
Which is, at the very least, a waste of my time. Don't you agree? If you think I actually misunderstood you, then by all means, write what you meant. But you can't or wont do that. Strange, isn't it? One might almost think that you intentionally don't want your meaning to be known. But that would be crazy talk, right?
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Not the topics themselves, but the reactions to your claims about those topics. It's always accusations of blinders and bias on everyone else, but not once in the four years I've read/posted in the Asylum have you entertained the possibility that maybe your conclusion was wrong. And not just that, but you get combative when someone even hints that you made a mistake.
It's not my job though. I present my point of view. If you disagree, then you present your own, countering point of view. What you're asking is that after I make my argument for my position, I'm supposed to then speculate as to what might be wrong about that position and argue against myself. Um... I'm not going to do that. If you think I'm wrong, then *you* need to say why. Just saying (or suggesting) that I am and then following with an insistence that I have to come up with the counters for my own arguments is pretty silly.
When you do that, it makes me assume that you disagree with me, but can't yourself produce a valid counter argument. So instead of acknowledging that you can't come up with a good counter, you insist that one exists, but you've just chosen not to reveal it. Then you try to push your failure to provide a counter to my argument onto me, as though somehow it's really my failure to see the flaws in my own positions. But don't you see how that's meaningless? You can *always* claim there's a flaw and then refuse to say what it is. And you can always argue that the other guy is at fault for not himself providing that information.
IMO, if you think there's a flaw in my argument, then you must provide it. Otherwise, you don't have a response at all. But that's how I do things. You're free to flail around in your own unique idiom if you want. I just happen to think it's a pretty counter productive process.
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A follow up question from a previous line. Did the amount of detail make a difference at all?
It's not just detail that matters. It's also the applicability of that detail. If you insist that X is better than Y, and when asked for support spent a ton of time talking about Z, you're not really supporting your argument. You're arguing *around* the issue instead. And in my book, people usually do that when they know they don't have a good argument in the first place.
