Presuppositions
Baron Max said:
But we see it here at the forums all the time ...a person pretends to be oh, so goody-two-shoes, so compassionate towards people ....then at the first sign of disagreement, they are the first to resort to anger, to lash out in anger at someone who disagrees. See? They aren't loving and compassionate, they just say that, just make that claim, while being no different to all the others in the world.
You presume much, Max. Some disagreement is dishonest, some is based on insupportable theses. If every circumstance occurred in its own conceptual vacuum, the presuppositions of your objection would be reliable. But as it is, you're conflating separate issues. As Spidergoat pointed out, there is both righteous and misplaced anger. Or Sniffy, "People often have legitimate causes for being angry".
In a setting like Sciforums, sometimes the causes of anger, legitimate or otherwise, are actually separate from the issue itself. This only compounds the problem. But around here there are plenty who pretend they're utterly and completely stupid, purporting to serve humanity in some way by being an idiot. After a while, this behavior will, if left unchecked, start to annoy the hell out of people. One should not be insulted by being presumed intelligent. And one certainly should expect that if they make a point of being an idiot, people will consider them an idiot.
Or there is the classic bit where someone is completely blind to the demands and implications of their own argument. Many times, when called out, people will say, and quite lamely, "I never said that." And it's quite stupid. Sure, one never comes out and says that A = B, but when one's argument compares A and B as equivalents in a consequential outcome, they're making the same point. It's often hard to believe that people with certain degrees of education are actually incapable of figuring this out.
Every once in a while, one might try a trolling trick wherein they construe an attempt to follow a principle to its logical end as a declaration of belief. It's the dumbest thing that employs a fallacious if/then construct in order to pretend one cannot grasp if/then constructs, as in, "If we follow this course of action, then this will be among the results." There are far better ways to deal with these explorations, so this particularly lazy form of disagreement tends to annoy people.
And sometimes people are just fatigued. For instance, at some point it becomes difficult to develop new responses to basic disagreements because the other refuses to even
acknowledge the counterpoints raised. Indeed, sometimes the disagreement is invested in that very failure of acknowledgment. There's only so much of this people are expected to tolerate.
Certainly there are occasional outbursts that seem inexplicable. Then again, not everybody keeps the emotional influences of the rest of their lives out of their Sciforums' personas. It's not exactly fair to take those things out on the community, but it's also a natural tendency among people. And that brings us to the fact of human imperfection.
Because you cannot conclude from such incidents that anger diminishes one's love and compassion unless you presuppose the illegitimacy of any given anger, the good faith of the disagreement, and the usurpation of human imperfection by willful corruption at the very least. And in a community like this, both as a general principle and in specific observation of the site's history, those are dangerous presuppositions with an application bordering on irresponsible.
