A deeply philosophical discussion of the flame war that will not be happening at BloodhoundBlog

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, good grief…

I can credit both sides of the rancorous dispute that is not going to happen.

I agree with Russell Shaw that Barry Cunningham can run roughshod over opponents in debate, and I knew without having to be told that Russ was steaming over this.

I agree with Barry on the factual prognosis for real estate. I watched it happen in the graphic arts, and I’m watching it happen in dozens of other industries.

I was laughing with Brian Brady on the phone last night that I have inadvertently introduced a second standard on ad hominem comments: Zero tolerance for everything else, but a wider latitude on Barry’s threads. I’ve stepped in when things seemed to be trending a little too flamey, but, for the most part I haven’t had huge objections.

Gentlemen, I want for you both — and for everyone reading this — to understand something that, like the oceans of air I am immersed in, is too obvious to me even to notice most of the time:

Weblogging is theater of the mind.

What we do is entertainment. It should be interesting, fact-based, persuasive — all that serious stuff. But we are competing for attention with radio and television, not Oxford University. I certainly want to talk about things that matter to me, and I have huge goals for real estate and for the world at large that I would like to see effected. But none of those things is going to happen overnight — and none of them in response to a blog post.

If Barry Cunningham paints the world with a broad brush and that makes you hot under the collar, the most interesting question is this one: Are you angry because he’s outrageously wrong — or because he might be right? When an argument is absurdly off the mark, we ignore it. Ha, ha. Who cares? It’s when things are too irritatingly right that we get irritated. Your emotional reactions tell you almost nothing about the world outside your mind — and almost everything about the world inside your mind.

But more importantly, all you need to do to defeat an erroneous argument is to shine a spotlight on it. Flaming is always rationalized by the logical fallacies Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make A Right, but none of that makes any difference. Fallacious arguments are rhetorical white noise. They are not just stupid and unpleasant, they are persuasively useless. You cannot malign or browbeat or campaign other people into taking your position, but what you can do, by persuasively valid debate, is completely undermine erroneous positions.

Want proof that this works? Even though Russ and no doubt many other people insist that my arguments on occupational licensing laws are “stupid,” no one can take them on as arguments and prove them wrong. I have won that debate — not by impugning motives, not by maligning character, not by coercive insinuations, not by ridicule or appeals to the mob or histrionic contempt — but simply by making an unassailable argument.

Even so: So what? Weblogging is theater of the mind. I won one argument, out of dozens, in what is for now a small but growing pond. What we are doing is entertainment, not world conquest.

And here’s the bottom line: Flame wars are bad for business. We are doing this so we all can learn, so we all can grow. We each of us have a right to be different from all the others — and you cannot imagine how important that right is to me. But we each of us have the right to be wrong, in other people’s eyes. I am very interested in spirited debate, but if spirits runs so high that we stop debating and just start squabbling, we are betraying our own objectives.

And: This will not happen. In comments threads, I can beat down flames by deleting the flaming comments. I make a point of putting no limits on contributors, but, as I have said before, I will intervene to break up fights among contributors. We are all of us guests in my home, and my guests are not going to abuse each other on my property. This is not censorship, this is civilization.

Russell Shaw and Barry Cunningham are so much alike it’s uncanny. Both big, brash funny men who are both much better at identifying injustice when it is coming toward them than when it is emerging from them. We all of us share this latter trait to some degree. Doesn’t matter. Barry has a right to his views, and so do the people who disagree with him. Russell has a right to disagree with Barry, but Tu Quoque is a fallacious argument no matter how cleverly expressed. Human beings will find ways to fight each other as long as there is anything to fight over. But they won’t do it here.

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