Posted by DR on July 24, 2005 at 16:17 [67.83.76.91]
In Reply to: Re: Thank you! posted by symbiosis on July 24, 2005 at 07:03
I appreciate the kind words symbiosis. But I disagree that the majority of posts are from the "less gifted." I've found the opposite to be true -- that the majority here are intelligent souls.
But even intelligent people sometimes offer arguments of lesser merit. They base their opinions on what they see, or on their emotions -- rather than thinking the issue through historically or dispassionately.
For example -- I often read opinions that say that men outnumber women by more than 20 to 1 in the diaper fetish world, but these opinions are only a short-sighted snapshot of *today's* Internet representativeness, but nothing more.
But were these intelligent people to look at these Internet ratios of ten years ago, they would see a 100 to 1 male-to-female ratio. If they looked further back -- at DPF's roster for example -- they might see that the ratio was 300 to 1. They would thus conclude that the tools used to measure such ratios -- ABDL rosters and even the Internet itself -- are imperfect, biased yardsticks that should be viewed with a healthy skepticism.
Others allow their passions to govern their arguments. These too make for muddled conclusions. I think we've seen a bit of both short-sightedness and emotionality here in this thread -- and understandably, since no one likes it when his job is given to someone else thousands of miles away. And while that pain is very real on a personal level, and even on a microeconomic level (towns, cities, etc.), it should not cloud our judgment about outsourcing, which is a tremendously positive thing for the overall picture.
But my point is that although intelligent people
sometimes don't think their conclusions through, that doesn't mean they are "less gifted" or unqualified to speak. Rather, when I respond to them, I call their arguments into question -- but *never* their intelligence.