ID: MUNROE @MunroeBergdorf posted: “Please don’t be surprised if I block you instead of engaging in ‘a debate’ about issues that don’t affect you, but impact on my life greatly. I do not need to, nor want to converse with people who prioritize their desire to prove a point, over my humanity and rights.”
Amanda Jette Knox @MunroeBergdorf replies: “THIS. You owe no one a debate on who you are, ever. Not online. Not in person. Not in the media.”
It’s easy to see this as a jaded mindset, and heck, maybe it is… but it’s still anyone’s prerogative to just say “I don’t want to discuss this, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door”.
I sometimes engage in good faith conversations, where I later realize the good faith was only from one side of the argument. That SUCKS, so I get it.
Personally, I’ll still try to talk, but just because I’m a naive fool doesn’t mean others need to be :P
Well, someone like you won over a homophobic teenager with kindness and a good faith discussion almost three decades ago. And that teen, once he stopped hating for half a second, found out that he was gay himself, so thank you for engaging with those voices.
I won’t tell you to keep doing it, since it is exhausting and I can’t tell you what to do, but know that those efforts are hardly a complete waste.
You’re fantastic.
Thank you very much for sharing! Very relieving to hear that people are able to change like this. I’m glad you also were able to see your own flaws. I’m the same in that regard. I used to be a huge jerk
But I wanna win!
The whole premise of a debate usually comes with the connotation that you will never get convinced, and that if the other person was more convincing than you, then you “lost” and just need to be more persuasive next time.
So yes, just telling someone their opinions are bad usually doesn’t work and is a waste of effort, no matter how well written and supported you are.
From what I can tell a lot of this is just Twitter culture. It is totally possible to have a debate where the point is exploring the ways your ideas do and don’t make sense rather than purely trying to “win” by addressing a crowd with propaganda and rhetoric, it’s just that the internet has trended strongly towards the latter over the years.
I agree with OP in that I wouldn’t try to debate people on Twitter either. That doesn’t mean debate has no value though, you just need to figure out where your line is for when it isn’t going to be worth responding, and then do the hard part of actually committing to that.
You lost this: \
Brain had an instant where I thought “is that…that Amanda Knox”
