Recently, a friend sent me a link to an old acquaintance’s blog. My friend noted that the blogger had been significantly challenged by a commenter, and she wondered whether he would respond. Last night I checked again to see, after several weeks, and sadly, the blogger has not responded.
Having had hundreds of “debates”, particularly online, I’ve seen this happen over and over. Someone makes a point, for which evidence or reason is shown in disproof, then the original poster has no reply. I call this “crickets”, as in, “All I heard was crickets chirping in the still night air.”
This practice is utterly dishonest. A person who cared enough to publish an assertion in the World Wide Web did not care enough to admit it when that assertion was disproved. Nor did they care enough to remove the assertion. And if you’re patient, you can probably catch them re-asserting it elsewhere.
I recently caught a Facebook friend making the exceptional claim that presidential candidate Ron Paul is funded by George Soros. Being always open to the truth, wherever it may lead, I naturally asked for documentation of that claim. No documentation followed, so after waiting patiently for a week or so, I challenged the friend to remove his assertion. After further crickets, I finally challenged his honor. That led simply to more crickets.
The particular irony in this case is that this friend is gung ho for a candidate who claims to be the real moral leader, taking a stand against various bad behaviors. Who better, I might have thought, to see the immorality in posting an untrue claim about Paul/Soros?
I didn’t just sit back during this “debate”; I researched the matter myself, posting the results of my work and asking repeatedly for more information. (I found nothing to substantiate the claim, and as usual, what I did find tended to refute the veracity of the claims that had been made.) So here I was, working to prove what the other guy had asserted, while he was not willing to lift a finger himself.
Do you see something morally wrong with that? I certainly do.
What happened to honor?
Jack
