[Remedy]

Consider: a person who remains unpersuaded by a reminder of the obvious truth has revealed himself to be an intellectual reprobate for whom facts are ultimately meaningless.

What may be gleaned from this exchange is that one can never truly come to a common understanding with a "gay" sophist, since he or she cares only about winning and not about the truth.

Yet there are many people who merely parrot "gay" rhetoric and who are really victims of sophistry, not sophists themselves. These people are persuadable.

Why Abortion Isn’t Important

Here is one of the (to my mind) greatest philosophers produced by England in the last century, telling people-especially other philosophers-that sometimes it is better to walk away than to argue. Why? Because a person's conscience can become so corrupt, and lead to such equally corrupt rationalizations, that to engage them in serious argument about those rationalizations is both pointless-being unlikely to have the slightest impact on their thinking-and, what is worse, dangerous-bringing the thinker of good will into serious danger of having his own conscience perverted by the sophistries of the other.

[scripter]

Here is one of the (to my mind) greatest philosophers produced by England in the last century, telling people-especially other philosophers-that sometimes it is better to walk away than to argue. Why? Because a person's conscience can become so corrupt, and lead to such equally corrupt rationalizations, that to engage them in serious argument about those rationalizations is both pointless-being unlikely to have the slightest impact on their thinking-and, what is worse, dangerous-bringing the thinker of good will into serious danger of having his own conscience perverted by the sophistries of the other.

I really like it. I just decided this morning to walk away from a discussion for very much the same reasons.