Silent3
Silent3's JournalThat's exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.
I've seldom seen anyone who responded to a disagreement with "Why are you against asking questions?" who was truly just asking questions... except perhaps of the "When did you stop beating your wife?" style of question.
To use an example not likely to raise hackles on DU, take climate change deniers as an example. When one of them asks something like, "If the earth is getting hotter, how do you explain snow falling on the pyramids in Egypt!?" (this did happen a couple of weeks ago), you could try to explain how climate change leads to wilder weather conditions, not just uniformly more heat everywhere, but you know damned well that person isn't going to listen to you. Their question is a rhetorical question, delivered with the smug assumption that you don't, and can't possibly, have a good answer -- certainly not an answer that's going to be good enough to satisfy them.
These people are pretty much always stating conclusions, and their passion belies any pretense that they're really reserving much doubt that they could be barking up the wrong tree.
How often has someone actually given you grief for *questioning* something?
And I mean just for questioning, and no more than questioning a policy, a plan, a system, an authority?
Other than a religious zealots who might get angry with you for questioning their dogma, dogma that they quite literally expect people to accept without question, and perhaps a few non-religious zealots who treat other political and philosophical issues with the same degree of fanaticism, I don't think this supposed offense of being giving grief for just asking questions really happens all that often.
What does happen more often, however, is that people pretty clearly state a point of view on a subject, have clearly reached what, for themselves, is a fairly definitive conclusion, they might even be talking about a plan of action based on that conclusion... and then, when someone disagrees with them, disagrees with their logic or their supposed facts, doubts the wisdom of their proposed tactics for achieving change, they disingenuously whine:
"What do you have against people asking questions!"?
"Why don't you want me asking questions!?"
"What do you have against questioning authority!?"
Please, people, just own it. Own what you say you stand for and believe in if you're going to speak out passionately about it. Don't pretend that something that's got you fired up to change the world, has already changed the way you live, has changed how you vote (or don't bother to vote), has changed who you trust or don't trust, is somehow "just asking questions".
You say a problem rates a 10. I say it rates a 7. You react as if I said the problem doesn't exist.
You react as if I'm all for causing the problem, that I'm part of the problem, that I don't think the problem is a problem at all, that I'm doing just what the problem-makers want us to do.
Unless I set my hair on fire and my flames reach as high as your flames, I am the problem.
It's really annoying that most of the internet, DU included, is like this.
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