Fisher, you don't tell people to shut up in civilized debate. That's for when things degenerate, and as far as I can tell no one has pulled out their slapping fishes yet. There is also some problems with the whole ignoring them thing, I ignore people plenty when they insult my heritage and they just keep on doing it. There is also a difference between feeding trolls and giving fundies whatfor. See, the problem here is that oppression exists in a gradient, and so well you may have dealt with it over the years, sometimes things just get too much and people burst. The world's a pretty tough place some days and screaming to let it out is occasionally required. It's just you can't allow it to become the norm. And if someone just keeps on offending you and they will never learn, an elbow to the solar plexus does wonders.

Also +1 Spink.

I want to say that no matter how civilized, polite and upright anyone thinks it is to show respect unconditionally, I will still deck the person who tells me my friend(s) deserve to live a life of abuse and poverty and deserve little more than being killed, that they're a menace, or they're broken, or messed up in some imaginary manner, or that they deserved being hurt, attacked, or deserve to be attacked, harassed or thrown through a traumatic experience.

 

Their position means absolutely nothing to me, granted they'd rather harm people I care about and are debating from a position of making it -legal- to harm people I care about. That's not a valid position. It's not a respectable one. It's a sick, disgusting, twisted one and whoever treats it like an actual, valid position and respects it is doing more harm by perpetuating the idea that thinking this way is "okay" and "valid" and is worthy for intellectual discussion and debate (albeit, less of the "intellectual" part).

 

If you respect every single person with such a venomous position: they won't listen to anything you say (re: vast vast vast majority of these debates I've had) and any points you make and evidence you bring forth will be ignored and they'll feel more validated by having that opinion because someone listened to it.

 

So, if someone presents stuff like that to me I'll simply tell them that it's a disgusting, rotten opinion not worthy of debate because the content is so cruel and pathetic that it's not worth entertaining as a basic idea in the first place. Because there is no debate when the idea is to treat people like sub-humans and I will not respect the position, nor the person if they really think it's a valid idea.

I want to be clear with this before I respond that I completely agree that someone who has this sort of idea is asinine beyond belief and has no right to be discussing what they're attempting to. I'm not endorsing that sort of thinking, and I don't want to be misconstrued as doing so.

Now with that said, I don't think this is a valid argument for a few reasons;

A. It's a far-gone extreme. People like that do unfortunately exist, and while they have an unfortunate tendency to be the loudest of the bunch, they're also, outside of certain areas in the world, extreme minorities. No, someone of this mindset does not deserve respect. No, treating them with respect won't do any good. But there's no way to make any progress with them in the first place because their head is on in such a messed-up manner that it's a loaded example.

B. For many of the same reasons above, antagonizing them won't be any more effective. Being respectful will make them feel validated, and being disrespectful will make them feel victimized. With someone this out-there, being nice, being honest, being blunt, being cautious, nothing will have any impact on someone this crazy. If they're already to this point, it would take an extreme occurrence in their life in order to get them to change their ways. Words, whether respectful or not, are not capable of that. It's not just that being respectful will do nothing positive, it's that nothing will do anything positive.

C. Someone this extreme was about as far from the situation I had in mind when writing the entry as possible. The situation I was trying to address is one I see on the internet way too often, where person A and person B are both incredibly passionate about subject C, and both hold reasonable positions. However person A takes offense at even the suggestion that they could be wrong, and proceeds to attack person B with a fury unknown to mankind for what was not intended as an aggressive remark in any way. The result is that person A is upset and seething, person B is either also seething and shoots right back on the defensive, or feels victimized and ignores anything further person A has to say because someone that upset can't be worth listening to from their perspective.

This kind of situation is different from the one you mentioned in three ways: 1. Person A in this scenario does not hold a reasonable position, but an extreme and unhealthy one. 2. There is no inherent civility in this discussion, which as far as I know, is an element of a proper debate. Person A not only holds an extreme position, they hold it firmly and would refuse to budge. Relatedly, 3. person A has no intention of considering the arguments of person B in the first place. Again, a willingness to be challenged and have one's arguments and beliefs open to debate and interpretation, as far as I understand it, is an essential part of a proper debate. Person A never goes in with any intent of a mutual dialog at all. All of this adds up to create a drastically different scenario than the one I first spoke with in-mind, and as a result I don't feel is applicable.

I don't mean any disrespect, but there's no way to create a response to that argument, both because there's no defense of a person with that sort of view, and because the situation given is completely different than the one intended. Plus someone spewing that much bile is clearly far beyond reason.

I also feel like it's worth mentioning that nowhere in the entry, except maybe the "no battle was ever won..." analogy, do I say that this applies 100% of the time with 100% of people. Other people have said that in the comments, but while I have no problems with them expressing their opinion - a contrast of different opinions in a respectful fashion is one of my favorite things to read - I never said it myself.

To be honest, my post wasn't really meant for what I presumed you meant Necro. It was more for the statements of definitive 100% every person deserves respect when they attempt to debate with you no matter what their position is (see: Fishers first post), which I wanted to simply state does not hold true all of the time and forever.

As for those people, the ones I've described, as being rare: they're not. There are entire organizations dedicated to such mindsets and full of such types of people (multiple organizations, in fact -- I'd list them, but many are politically active and BZPower does hold a rule about political discussion which tends to include a ban on discussing politically active groups) and in the past those organizations did have pull with some actual groups of people that could make some aspects of their vision reality. These people are all over the internet -- I've left sites because of their presence and the staff supporting their positions (that and being called numerous slurs and told to, in more graphic ways, to go off myself, didn't make me feel safe or comfortable there). On social media sites, actually even recently -- with BZPower members involved, in fact -- there was a disgusting occurrence of what I'm describing that targeted someone.

I come across these types of people in real life, too. The ones who will stand before a class during a class-debate and make statements like "X group of people don't deserve legal recognition, legal protections, they deserve to instead be killed, discriminated against, looked down upon because they're abnormal humans with mental issues [also implying people with mental issues deserve lesser treatment in society]' and that position will be regarded as a viable position to have and will actually be debated (well, debated by the one person in the class who's upset by it, namely myself) but then have the debate completely blown off because "I'm entitled to my own opinions, and am pulling my belief here from my very specific religious interpretation" (which was a popular one in most places I lived, and still live, even).

This is from students in my now-graduated-from high school (opinion even persisted in the college I was briefly a part of), parents of people I knew, the majority memberbases on websites I've been on, of communities I've been a part of. And it's encompassing many, many minorities and groups of people.

My point being, this type of viewpoint, this type of position and opinion, is very common and exists almost everywhere I've actually been (and even then I've known many people who have experienced so much worse than anything I have, or anything I've seen) and this type of opinion -- no matter what guise it comes under -- is not a respectable position. It's not one of someone to be respected in a debate.

That's my point.

Reasonable debate over something reasonable I agree with the "show respect and decency" message. But debate over something unreasonable (treat x groups as sub-humans because I don't like them) is not a debate deserving of any amount of respect (and is more common of a position people have than most would think).

Though ignoring that type of position doesn't do any good (and ignoring these types of people is almost impossible, especially individuals that want to make it personal with someone). Since other people might listen to it and be like "well, it was never challenged so, must be okay to think" and that can lead to actual consequences in real life... though if it's called out for what it is (sick, twisted bile serving only to hurt and harm people for no reason), then others might be more like "yeah that sounds pretty rotten now that I think of it."

(So yeah, I don't respect people who say things like "You're a bad individual for being X and deserve all the vitriol in the world because, though I understand nothing of it and that becomes clear with what I'm going to say, made that 'decision'")

EDIT:

Sorta feel like this is relevant, judging by some of the comments:

When people are referring to "oppression" or "being oppressed" they're not referring to... minor dislike of their interests, or career choices. People are referring to legal discrimination that takes place because they belong to one of multiple groups the controlling establishment does not like. For example, receiving less pay for doing the same job as your peers due to a physical trait, or inherent trait, about you. Legally being fired from a job because you have a boss who decides a benign trait about you is fire-worthy (benign as much as hair color). Legally being kicked out of establishments because you have traits the owner or manager or worker in the establishment doesn't like. Being given death threats, having grievous crimes committed against you, being harassed to the point where it does break the law, but no one you go to helps you, or laughs about your situation and waves it off as not a big deal. When media and books and organizations deliberately misrepresent who you are because of these traits (perpetuating harmful stereotypes), who even go on smear campaigns over people like you (who might be kids, even) on the basis that they don't like you, that they think something's wrong and messed up with you and that the law should be altered to deal with people like you by granting you less rights, less protections (or just having needed protections denied), and that the goal of their organization is to have a world where people like you are either all dead, don't exist, or are put aside from society and left to rot. And so much more.

And when crimes, hate-crimes, and so on occur and happen for people to say to the victim of the crime "well, you were at fault for being X in the first place!" and then sympathizing with the guilty party because the guilty party lacks all of the traits the victim has that lead to them being victimized in the first place.

Again, Spink, I agree with most of what you're saying, but I have to ask because I can't figure it out; Where are you that and what are you doing that you come across these people so regularly? I'm not saying you're wrong on that - it'd be kind of hard for me to prove your experiences wrong - or that it's somehow your fault, but there has to be something that factors into it, because I've met two, three, maybe four people like that in my life, and one of them was the son of another one of them.

I honestly think anyone deserves respect no matter what view point they hold on any matter. That doesn't mean everyone deserves respect. There's more that one way to skin a cat and there's certainly more that one way to go about putting your point across, no matter how much you disagree with the others. It's not always easy as most people will often feel like an attack on their opinion is an attack on them. I have many friends that share completely different beliefs to me. So much so that if I saw them for the belief I wouldn't call them my friends. That's why I see the person, not the view point. I think it's important to always remember that there are people behind a computer screen and not just an embodiment of the exact opposite of what you believe.

There... wasn't any other factor?

I'm not going into grave detail of every single instance, but the basic of every occurrence I experienced was: "I'm getting along with this community of people, cool. They're all nice to me, include me and give me compliments for what I contribute. Talked about previous/current relationship issues one night when it came up in discussion, found it funny they thought I was female before I informed them I'm male, be subjected to language that isn't repeatable on BZPower, multiple messages containing threats, slurs, and more that I'm not comfortable discussing on BZPower of all places"

Or just putting up posters (LGBT Safe Space promoting). Or just wearing a shirt (LGBT Safe Space promoting). I don't feel like I really have to go into anymore detail or provide any detailed examples on reactions, granted that's rather personal and I'm not comfortable getting into that on a website like BZPower.

This type of stuff really isn't that uncommon.

(People sitting back and trying to debate if one group of people deserves certain rights over other groups of people is more what I'm getting at here, and I iterate again that it's not a respectable debate. Disrespecting someone from the start of a debate by essentially saying "Hey, I'm more normal, better and more deserving of decency than you. Here's why and my opinion on why" doesn't deserve a respectable response. The person who's being subjected to that has no obligation to respect that other person, granted the other person doesn't even respect the person they're trying to debate with enough to recognize that they're speaking with another human being and are instead insulting that person throughout discourse -- And if they did recognize this, then there wouldn't be a debate in the first place).