[Dante Hicks]

Originally Posted by Deffeh

Usually i make these statements to be overly controversial or raise a discussion point, as well as obviously doing them in anger sometimes.

There's no real need to make something additionally controversial - if a topic is worthy of discussion it doesn't need the flamebait.

And to be honest, sometimes the generalisations are so broad they actually become a completely different point. No-one minds a little exaggeration for effect and indeed that's a common feature in internet discourse. So
"The amount of non-white MPs is like 0.000000000000001% of the total or something"

Is a valid enough point, albeit exagerrated. However if someone was to say "There's a lot of legal barriers in the UK which makes it impossible for a non-white person to be an MP." then obviously that would be false as evidenced by the fact there non-white MPs (albeit a relatively low number). The most obvious example I can think of is here where you say :

no one is really half irish, they just have some irish blood in them somewhere back back back down the line and wap the knowledge of this out as if the rest of our gene pool is contaminated somehow

Well the thing is your post is ambiguous here. You could be making a point about categories like "half-Irish" are essentially meaningless - and I think Tomkat argues that later in the thread. But from what you later say (when accusing me of pedantry) it seems that you actually meant something like "The amount of people calling themselves 'half' Irish is disproportionately high". Which is fair enough but is a completely different point.

4. "Attack is the best defence" / The idimmu / Game

I'm curious as to why you picked these two for this one, but then again I tend to avoid IRC for debates (it seems a terrible medium for such an endeavour). Lots of people do this (probably the majority of GD). How many times has someone's argument / point been dismissed because the poster is too young / mentally ill / a lawyer / too short / too fat / etc?

7. Pedantry / The Jakiri

Picking up on one small inaccuracy and ignoring the broad thrust of any argument made.

While I doubt Mark would deny being a pedant, I don't actually recall him doing that very often (if at all) during any serious debate. Sometimes of course one exception does disprove an entire argument (as in my example above) and it's entirely appropriate to concentrate on one example.

The main one that irks me is when people don't actually read what is being said and just post some sort of (typically emotional) auto-response. The threads on paedophilia usually have some responses of that nature - I think DarkJedi once posted lengthy attack on Yahwe while completely missing the point of the argument, but I can't find it now.