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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5619461" data-attributes="member: 54877">There are some unreasonable people on both side, but typically, they are not unreasonable in the same way--on this issue. (You get outliers, of course, and everyone has off days, even normally reasonable people.) This is one reaons why, I suspect, both sets of unreasonable people can feel oppressed by even-handed moderation. From their perspective, the "other side" really is getting away with something that they themselves aren't doing. Personally, I don't care. It would suit me fine if moderation was heavily in favor of shutting down 4E proponent excesses and more lax on other excesses. I think that some of the best ways to make my points is sometimes to simply let the guy whom I think in error to keep talking! Obviously, then, I'm not in favor of people agreeing with me but digging a deep hole under my position. Naturally, moderators, wanting to be fair, have to be more judicious about this than what I would enjoy. But to the larger point, there have been several examples, with a couple of new ones lately, digging such holes, and they have fallen directly into the trap of arguing feelings. It is a lot easier to argue against them, than the more accurate objection: You can have whatever feelings you want, but the moment you start generalizing to other peoples' experiences and design and any number of things, there had better be more of a basis than your feelings. Calling people on failure to have more of a basis is not claiming that your feelings are invalid. It is rather that your feelings are signs and indications of something, but not necessarily conclusive about any one thing in particular. Shifting ground between feelings and logic is partly natural. One really ought to be consulting both, to make sure they are at least somewhat in sync. Missing the transition is a common and expected error. Doubling down on it is not so common, and thus should be given a lot less slack. Joe Player is angry. Joe Player doesn't like new version of his favorite game because it did X. X makes Joe Player angry. X probably makes other people angry. X makes all "right playing" people angry. If you aren't angry about X, well, then we can't call you out on a message board like this directly, but boy, we can imply it constantly. Write it out like that, and any honest reader over the age of 12 can spot at least some of the flaws. Some 12 year olds might spot the flaws, reject the "conclusion", but then take the unwarranted step of rejecting that Joe is angry. Or that he has a reason. Or that even he knows the reason. (That last one gets tricky, for various degrees of "knows".)  One of the characteristic, unreasonable debating tactics deployed by some of the more virulent 4E bashers has been to switch freely between emotive feeling and argument, and then whichever way they are answered, to switch to the other. As to why, I could make several guesses, but I don't think that would be wise, except to say that many reasons why are a lot more benign than one would first think.  And from the receiving end, it really doesn't matter why.  If it happens enough, you feel rather annoyed.  See, we have feelings too. I will say that Raven Crowking is an excellent example of someone who is not doing this, but is engaged in a lot of the same arguments, from a similar perspective, of people that are. This is what makes his posts so valuable to me. I'm challenged by his posts, rather than fatigued by them.</blockquote>

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