Re: The Short Reply

I certainly don't want my blog turning into a debate on dog urination either so after these final words I'll leave the argument alone beyond a few final comments below pertaining to the "wider issue" of blog opinions to which you've applied this issue.

I'm sure I could sit here and agree with some points and disagree with others from "The Long Reply", and I do, my argument could have been better (even with some editing of existing material it would seem) and at the same time I could apply a number of these fallacy-tests to your own critical analysis and find over-simplification through loaded language and the use of an inconsistent analogy as a result of misinterpretation, possibly among other things, and possibly I could even be wrong about either or both of those; the effort needed to determine that vs. the importance of doing so at this stage dictates that any such counter-analysis wouldn't be worth my time. It's pretty irrelevant. What it boils down to is this: beyond pointing out that you didn't address the issue correctly in your tagboard response and my countering this response with ideas which were hardly infallible relating to whether or not people do or not care - I was essentially, at the end of it all, asking what the problem is; whether anyone should care. And you admit in reply that it's a pet peeve, and as such if I'd simply began by asking this in the first place, in the tagboard, any further argument would have been quite redundant. You're right to say that what was said was pedantic - correcting an irrelevant line of argument on my part, and your countering by pointing out my employment of certain assumptions that can not be deemed to be true without showing further evidence to support them.

So if that's the case then it is in "The Short Reply" that my interest now lies. You see, the examples you provided here are not only of opinions as in the more general 'points-of-view' on issues which can include opposing sides of a fact-driven argument, but are of opinions about entirely opinion-driven things. Nobody would set about debating whether any one of these opinions is correct or not because there is no underlying factual basis with which to determine an absolute truth - an opinion on these will be fuelled by nothing more than a personal disposition.

Thus I have this to say about your entry in general. Firstly, that on an opinion-based subject like those examples you provided, obviously people may wish to respond in the tag board with an equally opinion-based agreement or disagreement as happens all the time (and beyond that nothing normally escalates) and this would be deemed appropriate and in the spirit of a blog's purpose. However, to make a statement of opinion pertaining to an explicit issue leaves open to discussion differing opinions on whether or not any underlying premise you happen to suggest is "correct" or not, in this case the by now "well-publicised" issue of whether or not dogs urinating in public is in fact a problem (which I get the feeling nobody wants to hear anything more about, so I apologise to anyone else following all this). If there was in fact a problem, a problem I was asking in my blog-response to be enlightened upon, then perhaps there would be relevant facts behind the issue that you might have used to form your opinion on dogs urinating in public. That would be going beyond a simple statement of like or dislike of the action occurring, and would invite discussion on the issue. As your initial reply in the tagboard moved away from opinion vs opinion and provided solutions for an underlying, undisclosed and assumed problem, I felt that I would not be stepping outside of the confines of what is considered reasonable when responding to an "emotionally charged" opinion by responding at length because you had gone beyond the point of simply stating such an opinion in your blog, an opinion like the examples you've provided in "The Short Reply". You at the very least seemed to have implied in your tagboard an underlying 'absolute' problem to which solutions could be applied, because the assumption in your words was that people should do something about dogs urinating in public (why would they if there was not a problem?). So among other things I questioned, at the core of my reply, what this problem was that you were attempting to find a solution to. As you have since expressed that your problem with this issue lies in personal annoyance, you agree then that this isn't the case, that there is no underlying problem about which facts can be used to argue each way as to whether that 'problem' really is a material problem or not, and hence the argument need go no further because it is, clearly, a matter of opinion... now. It is in fact clearly in line with the examples you provided of opinions on entirely opinion-driven issues - now. It obviously was not however when I made my reply, when some underlying problem was being implied and had not been stated.

What I'm leading up to is this: I agree entirely about not taking what people say in their blogs and putting it under a microscrope and going overboard. You made this point well by using the David Lynch example. You did not however provide an example here essentially any different from those at the beginning of the entry; my quoted statement was an exaggerated opinion and of course any discussion at all about its validity would indeed be absurd just as with any argument in search of an absolute truth when dealing with a matter that is purely one of opinion. But I myself did not reply in length beyond a typical-of-tagboards offering of an opinion, which would be fine for all of your examples ("Lynch's last two movies sucked, you're viewing him with rose-tinted glasses and an overly-sentimental bias towards his older works" for example) until you offered what I deemed the makings of an actual argument outside of your initial blog comments through a move away from "I dislike" to "this is a problem", and when you did that I felt invited to make a counterargument in order to clarify the issue.

Did you initially "talk in arguments"? No. Neither did I initially reply as though you had. I never considered what you said in the blog an argument, I just felt that your personal opinion was harsh with respect to the second part of your reasoning (agreeing of course with your first statement that people should clean up the crap their dogs leave behind) and as such replied as people often do to such opinions. Until you provided what I felt was an invalid argument in response in the tagboard, implying that there was a problem that should be fixed by suggesting solutions, something which was not simply a basic opinion consistent with those examples you've provided ("I hate the weather today" etc.), I took it no further. I agree with everything you said in The Short Reply, I just don't believe it has any relevance to my decision to extensively reply in my blog. Because you're right - I don't make a habit of randomly arguing about everything, and I wouldn't argue if you'd simply said something like any of the examples you've provided and nothing more; but I do have a tendency to argue when I believe that somebody has made an invalid statement which I feel has subsequently invited a response and when I happen to feel like expressing my disagreement, and I felt that happend when you both implied an underlying absolute problem that dog owners should be addressing (as opposed to a problem you personally have with something as a matter of opinion and nothing more) and talked about incontinence in your tagboard to support your solutions which I felt was irrelevant.

So, at this point I'm supposed to have said some nice happy concluding thing where we all end up in agreement etc. so it doesn't go on and on. Um. Well yeah, I agree with your overall sentiment about what blogs are for. And sometimes I use mine to express an opinion or a query myself, possibly one I'll try to back up, however successfully, when I disagree with or don't fully yet comprehend an opposing view.