“Don’t blog unless you have something to offer besides your opinion. Blog only if you want to teach and be directly useful to others.”

Hmm… What if we’re not really qualified to teach anything? Are we only useful if we know something that most other people don’t? Can’t opinions be useful sometimes in giving a different perspective even if it sounds like we’re bullying? Just some rhetorical questions. I know that your post was directed at people who think that their opinion can or should change the world.

I enjoyed reading Amanda’s comment and links.

Was it so much in our (collective) nature to “bully” before the internet became so popular? I can’t remember anything before it now, but I’m constantly longing for something else. I don’t want to argue- 95% of the time. I want to know what you think, I want to tell you what I think, I want to explore facts and findings and come up with possible explanations.

I care next to nothing about being right, but these days it seems all about winning the argument (and who really wins? somebody gives up because they don’t want to argue anymore, but nobody wins).

We don’t know anything. We can’t
know anything beyond personal experience and faith. This technically makes everybody’s reality different, but I prefer not to “go there” it doesn’t matter.

Why are we (myself sometimes guilty as charged) feel such a need to pursuade? Such a need to press one perspective on others and not allow them to think or decide for themselves… and then, at least in my case, such disgust when so many people show themselves unable or unwilling to actually think for themselves.

Amusingly, after I opened that wordpress account I put up some experimental entries- trying to test topics, tags, handling readers and my overall tolerance for blogging. There are only 3 right now, but one of them was about the seemingly psychotic way certain people basically scream bloody murder if you mention anything of a religious context online. Some guy, and I don’t know or care who because he’s obviously a “preacher” in the ways described above, wrote an about.com post about how horrible my post was.

(mine: http://amandajwb.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/open-letter-to-an-highly-offended-internet-atheist/
his: http://atheism.about.com/b/2008/01/28/open-response-to-an-offended-internet-theist.htm)

It seems particularly funny in reflecting on that tendency to stubbornly argue a point and the need to be right because this post in general has made me realize just how sick of all that I am, yet it is very hard not to be that way. It is very hard not to call somebody out on the “weaknesses” of their point-of-view, or to insist that anybody opposed to my perspective is clearly an idiot.

I have no idea why that is. I have no brilliant (or dim) insight into the issue. As the guy so offended by my blog post would say, this comment is highly irrelevant ;D. Maybe it’s culture. Maybe we are socialized to act this way… or maybe in the case of academics as you mentioned, there is a (feeling of a)danger of making yourself worthless when you can’t “win” and “pursuade”.