as I don't frequent that other forum often anymore. Judging by the quality of the posts refuting that OP, perhaps I should frequent it more.
Reading that thread reminded me of an article that I've had bookmarked for a while, but haven't read in its entirety yet
When We Can’t Both Be Right.
Sometimes it happens that two people have two completely opposing opinions about something. We can take identical lists of objective facts, filter them through a big variety of cultural conditioning, expectations, mores, and personal inclinations, and come out with an opinion that might totally differ from someone else with the same exact list of facts. Our opinions are not, themselves, factual. They’re what we do with facts. Our opinions ideally will be based on facts, though, which is why we don’t generally like it much when someone gets the same facts we think we got and yet still disagrees with us.
<snip>
I play stupid phone casual games (I am not ashamed of my love). In one of them, a young player I’d never encountered before was freaking out about a software application that she thought allowed pedophiles to make contact with young children, and she wanted to warn everybody she could reach not to use that software. I didn’t know her or how she’d come by her opinion, but I did what she clearly hadn’t bothered to do, which was take 20 seconds to Google this supposed threat. I came out with a Snopes article (among many others) saying that no, actually, the application wasn’t a problem at all. I took a second to tell her that she didn’t need to be afraid.
Her reaction was surprising: she got mad at me and insisted that we just had different opinions about the app and she was totally entitled to her opinion that this app was dangerous because it fed children’s contact information directly to pedophiles. In her mind, we could both be right in our ways, so I should just let her bother strangers forever.
I told her no, actually, we could not both be right. If I was saying it was harmless and she was saying it was a horrible threat, then no, we could not both be right about that; it was as stark as me saying that a day is 24 hours long, and her saying it was 48 hours long. The app’s danger level was a fairly objective thing. Either it was dangerous or it was not dangerous. One could quibble about how dangerous the word “dangerous” means, yes, but if the app was feeding contact information to pedophiles as claimed, I think we could all agree that the word meant in this case “pretty damned dangerous.”
http://rolltodisbelieve.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/when-we-cant-both-be-right/
As much as religious proponents of "kumbaya" want it to work, there comes a point where it just doesn't, as evidenced by this article. And, as mentioned in this article, the proponents of kumbaya will use the phrase "it's just your opinion" to imply that both your opinion and any dissenting opinions have equal basis in fact and logical reasoning, when in fact, this may not be the case. It's terribly frustrating, and while I salute the posters who care enough to post in that other forum, it is still half-past give-a-fuck in my timezone.
= new reply since forum marked as read
