True or false, When you silence your opponents you do not prove them wrong, you prove only that you are afraid of what they say?

[Anonymous]

I think this is true. I think both sides of the political spectrum do this. I think its sad.

True

False

A total of 25 votes were cast: 2 girls and 23 guys. See detailed results

Updates

+1 y

For those that voted false, it's too bad you didn't have the balls to comment.

[yepdonethat]

Majority of the time, yes. People want to exist in that safe bubble and when truth or facts come crashing in, it shatters that little world they liked. Happens to a lot of people. I for one, do not silence people. If the debate is going nowhere or the other person just starts using childish tactics, I just put them on repeat. But I don't block or silence them, nor do I report them. I just repeat the last thing I said over and over. LOL. Drives them nuts.

[Snakeyes7]

100% true

[laly520]

true to some extent

[strateguy632]

true that is the whole facebook and twitter authority to censor people. the whole anger about phobia and calling stuff phobia so people can't say legitimate criticism of whatever phobia... and the censoring for such phobias and offensive. all to hide truth and mislead people.

[Drew-1990]

Silencing an opponent does not prove you right, it just proves you are better are arguing. I once knew a guy who "won" every argument or debate we had because he knew how to upset me and get me frustrated. He never had to prove any point or anything just upset to the point I quit trying.

[ChicoFromThe305]

I can agree to this, there's moments I've stayed quiet in arguments cause I know I'm right and they lack the brain power to comprehend it, at that point you have a better chance a wall will reply back when you speak to it than they will understand your point of view.

[BCA6010]

I think this is true almost all of the time. If you truly believe that your opponent is wrong, then you would let them speak and be able to prove them wrong.

[Anonymous]

You only silence some idea or person because you don't trust anyone else with the information. This of course is about control as if you don't trust someone with information its because you wish to control them.

[goaded]

Do you think lies are information?

[Opinion Owner]

@goaded Information is defined as everything. Not simply what you judge relevant or 'correct' to any particular question.

Indeed it is the sharing of such 'information' that is critical to everyone being able to decide what is correct or relevant.

[goaded]

Except "Lying is giving some information while believing it to be untrue, intending to deceive by doing so", so how does that help anyone "to decide what is correct or relevant"?

The whole point of a lie is to stop people from making an informed decision whether something is true.

[goaded]

I'd really like to hear your opinion.

[Opinion Owner]

@goaded How does it help anyone for a tree to fall in the forest or a meteorite to fall on your property?
Unless you know how to investigate and figure out how to deal with whatever happens for reasons beyond your knowledge not too many things will help you.

from a evolutionary point of view the Art of deception or even its most extreme application the art of war has driven people to improve and in doing so helped them venomously. When said warring stops soo too does their progress and with it stagnation.

The lies and the war certainly didn't help the people who partake it directly but it forced them to question everything and improve themselves driving them to innovate and rid themselves of idleness and corruption.

Indeed soo important was this aid, that even in its absence say because of the establishment of an overwhelmingly powerful goverment we see stagnation is the result.

China was overtaken by the west because china had peace.

So to answer your question how does a lie help anyone? A lie forces everyone to keep their minds open to a world we don't understand. In other-words it helps people find and stay true to the truth.

[goaded]

Nice sidestepping of the actual question which was "how does [a lie] help anyone "to decide what is correct or relevant"?". Interesting that you seem to see lies as an act of war, while also holding them up as necessary "information".

Lies don't force people "to keep their minds open", they make it harder to determine the truth. They are used to pit people against each other and they are used to start wars.

The truth is that Saddam did not have WMD - the lie that he did killed millions and upset a balance of power that kept Iran in check. The truth is that the USA is not the devil, the lie that it is led to 9/11 and the Afghan war. The truth is that Trump lost the 2020 election, fair and square - his lie has lead to the near destruction of the US government (the least effective Congress in history), and the first time a president didn't hand over power peacefully and without calming their supporters. Had he succeeded, it would have been the end of US democracy.

[Opinion Owner]

@goaded I didn't side step your question of how lying which is the art of deception (that war is also) helps but answered it with the simple fact that. The ability to deal with lies as the existence of such lies requires is also the ability to find new solutions to deal with a world we don't understand.

It is only easier for you as an individual to simply trust others and take their solution to the unknown as your own rather than innovate and investigate to perhaps find a better one.

In the real world we are constantly at war with nature and conflicting interest of others none of whom are normally benefited by our success. Thus you will be dealing with lies regardless with less success due to less frequency of the associated skills.

It is in fact your inability to utilize such skills appropriately perhaps for want of such use, that you have not only falsely defined such action as lies but failed to investigate toughen to realize what they really were and thus learned something useful about your enemy.

In the case of Iraq we still don't know they didn't have WMD as we failed to control the border with Syria where what evident we do have suggest they were sent. Regardless failure to prevent that or identify compliance tells you about the limitations of the state to know the truth. A fact you would find extremely useful in more successful your policy choices and plans if you were not going to the least likely explication of some kind of conspiracy in which nobody wins and too many to control had to be in on it without a motive.

As for elections we likewise will never know who won and failure to conduct them in a transparent way in which everyone could see and understand has already undermined the credibility of the system.

Silencing the person who points out the flaws for having done so is addressing said concerns but proving you don't trust other people to think for themselves making it hard to believe you trust other people to vote either.

[goaded]

Yes, you did. My question was "how does [a lie] help anyone "to decide what is correct or relevant"?". You responded by saying it was "how does a lie help anyone?" and talking about how the existence of lies helps progress, which is certainly not true of individual lies themselves. Then you pretend that I believe everything I'm told and that we "will never know who won" the 2020 election, although that itself is a lie.

[Opinion Owner]

@goaded I am not sure how it is that you can conclude my assertion that a lie or rather the existence of lies help everyone by forcing the same to learn to think for and investigate for themselves. Is not benefiting the individuals that do so learn.

I must conclude you disagree for the same reason that you support a welfare state in that you must believe people need not a necessity to drive them to improve.

As for the 2020 election it is impossible to know who won the majority of votes in said states because it is impossible to verify the origins of said ballots. The evidence now having since been distorted with the records and ballots we never will know now.

Unfortunately you don't seem to appreciate the fact that the more complex you make a system the less observer able and verifiable you make it as there are more places where it might be corrupted or not work. In demanding we respect the results of your new "voting system" you are demanding we have faith that people who have every reason in the world to corrupt it and countless unobservable ways to do so in this complex system didn't.

That is a unreasonable request given how little trust the political leaders involved have made themselves worthy of.

There is regardless a good reason they don't vote like this in most other countries. Certainly not in low trust countries as theses united states increasingly are.

[goaded]

Gah! "my assertion that a lie or rather the existence of lies help..."

That's exactly the problem; you don't admit a difference between the existence of lies (a fact that everybody is aware of) and the telling of a specific lie.

You can conclude any nonsense you like, to try to talk about something else, but it doesn't affect the fact that lies are not useful information. They are deliberate misinformation.

Like your assertion that we can't possibly know the results of the election when the only election you've got a problem with was 2020. Not, for example, 2016.

I believe Republican election officials when they say the Republican candidate lost because it's not in their interests. If they were to lie about an election, it would be to pretend their candidate won.

[Opinion Owner]

@goaded You asked how a lie helps a person, you cannot ignore the broad consequences of a lie in its effect upon people in answering that question. As such a individual lie is indistinguishable from the knowledge of lying. In that if it were not to exist that knowledge would not either.

This is as true that an individual case of lying might be harmful but that is not what you asked.

Regarding the 2020 election we are talking about a large number of different elections many key ones were in fact unknowable. The fact that some republicans in some elections certified them as good does not mean all elections were secure nor even that those elections were honest as they simply had to work under law with the dishonest system they were given.

To say they had no interest to accept said results and going home presumes they had better options and didn't desire going home more than following them. In many cases they were actually ordered to accept such, again because the rules of the system both passed by legislators and via lawless judicial mandates. Did not permit a verifiable standard of evidence as indeed is the case for many states.

[goaded]

Oh, bullshit. Even if you can make a case that lying is beneficial, individual lies are not.

I asked if you thought lies were information, and, when you said yes, I defined "lie" and asked how does that help anyone "to decide what is correct or relevant"? So, when you claim "that is not what [I] asked", you are lying.

Every legal challenge, every recount, every audit of the 2020 election found practically no fraud. Not a single claim of election altering fraud was true. Yet you're still perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was vastly different from every other election before or since, not to mention that Republicans legislatures and election officials were involved in that fraud against their own candidate.

Lies aren't information, lies are misinformation. Lies are intended to keep people from understanding the truth. Your sort of lies are intended to keep people angry, divided, and ignoring the problems they have in common.