Internet Arguments

As most (if not all) of you know, there was some fairly heated discussion on a recent post I wrote about the Knoxville Church Shooting.  It made me think of this cartoon that I saw a while back, found again on this website (to give some credit – sadly I’m not sure where it came from originally).   –edit – Thanks to Hunter in the comments below, the image comes from http://xkcd.com/386/

In my younger days I used to debate, argue and all out fight sometimes over different things on the internet, whether it was on a blog, message board or other interactive communication platform.  As a lot of us know now, nothing productive ever comes of it.  Most people are there to simply argue, whether they actually believe what they’re saying or not.  I whole-heartedly believe there are a lot of people out there just to argue for the sake of arguing – nothing more.  They simply take the other side of an issue just for the fun of being controversial.

Sometimes this is a healthy thing – it can force people to fully think about things they’re saying, or to back up why they believe what they do.  Honestly that is one of the more helpful things I learned from never-ending flame-wars.  But again, for the most part (and this is the biggest lesson I learned) these things are just that – a never-ending flame-war.  Nobody wins, everybody loses.

I got sucked into it in the aforementioned post.  I didn’t intend for it to turn into an argument, but I sort of expected it to, if that makes sense.  In other words, I wasn’t going to let the possibility of it stop me from speaking my mind and saying what I believe.  But I guess that’s how they all start, huh?