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Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Sure it is. I, for one, would be fascinated to see how many people who brought up homelessness or veterans know the amount of money that is put into those issues annually.
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I do not care about this - they're either right or wrong. I do care about the amount of money that's put into those issues, whether it's an over or underfunding from an objective sense.
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It's noble that you try to be very pragmatic and strictly logic driven in your formation of argument but can you see how your critique of debate method is no different than the method you're critiquing?
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No, I can't. This statement doesn't make sense to me. Please explain what you mean.
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It matters that people use these issues, because the issue becomes: Are they using them for the right reasons?
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I do think this matters, in the sense that if a person is being intellectually dishonest in this case they're likely to be intellectually dishonest in the future. However, I really need some pretty strong evidence to come to that conclusion (someone presenting a slanted case multiple times despite being confronted with contradictory evidence, for example), and I do not have that here.
So in light of that, the attempt to mind-read people and then immediately discard, without consideration, the points they've raised is simply not productive. Let's consider those points and adopt, modify or discard them as necessary.
It seems that the trope of "well let's spend this on homelessness instead" is a common theme that's been raised - it seems like some people (I'm not sure if you're among them) think that this prevalence is a
reason to ignore the suggestion. It's not, it's a reason to formulate a response, which I'd think might be, "we should separately consider whether certain programs to alleviate homelessness should be funded, but this is a good way to spend $700 million regardless", or alternatively, "here is why spending $700 million on this problem is putting the money where it can do the most good".
As you might be able to tell from my views on this and basically every other topic, I'm becoming
extremely concerned about the normalization of this technique for hiving off divergent points of view and discarding them without giving them any thought because of the imagined/alleged motives of the person(s) advancing them.