My last post was really quite a once-off thing, except now some things have made me think about it again. I posted a question on another blogging website’s community recently and was hoping to receive some good food-for-thought replies, but most of the comments I got were either short and not very informative or sarcastic and dismissive of the validity of my question. Admittedly, the question could be viewed as rather ludicrous (do veggies feel pain?) but I meant it to be taken seriously. That disappointed me. Like how I mentioned reading about it in Feminist Philosophers, the human will has an unfortunate tendency to assert itself forcefully in discussions.

Another thing the post brought to my attention was how easily people begin cat-fights in a discussion. It might be the people themselves who contribute to it (I’d term this the environment for want of a better term), especially so in the community I was in. If I had started the discussion on wordpress, for instance, or a science journal (provided one could even start threads in both places), the response I’d have gotten would have been very different. For one, the replies would have had a lot more depth and supportive evidence, and two, people probably would not have been as easily angered.

One commentor posted a long reply about how she thought plants were intelligent beings and might feel pain or equivalent and that people who didn’t think so were narrow-minded, to paraphrase her words. I felt that the tone was okay, and strictly speaking I don’t think that she was really to be taken that seriously in what she said about narrow-mindedness. Her comment garnered a lot of criticism though. The post is more of an ego fight than a proper discussion now, which I realised sadly reflects society. People all too often find it so difficult to critique and so easy to critisise, and even easier to mock another person’s views. The perfect intellectual debate should not be about putting the other person down or manipulating emotions to earn a victory, but about listening to the other person. It’s pretty depressing to think that most people in the world are often too busy, to hurried, to caught up in their normal everyday stress to think about their actions for a while.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how tolerant are you? 1 being least and 10 the most tolerant. And why would you say that?

I think most people have a tolerance level of about 6. After a short while they break. Many are quick to judge, quick to set their views concerning a particular person or situation. I envy such people their deftness of thought and judgement, but it’s not always good. Conflicts often start because of a sudden wrong move. How often do you read the words “… sparked off a controversy” in the news? It is so easy to sway the crowd to your will, as long as you have the skill to do it.