It has become par of the course here that a certain group of posters read what they want to read here rather than what is actually written.
Go ahead and laugh, but both of you have been doing it. That makes it really frustrating for trying to keep up with this thread, since the rest of us have to figure out what has substance and what doesn't.
I know topics like this can raise passions, which is why I suggested earlier (or was that another thread?) that you both take more care in reading each other's posts. A quick read and off-the-cuff response is the easy temptation, but often it can make for crappy discussion.
At times you guys have reminded me of the political representatives for our candidates, who have canned responses they want to give, and standard interpretations of what the other guy said, so what we get isn't dialog but a comedy of errors.
JohanLarson made a point about taking time to cool off. In exchanges in this forum, I long ago learned that a post written with emotion driving is a failure no matter what you say. That isn't to say passion is a bad thing, but it has to be guided by reason, which means:
1. reading the other guy's post
2. reasoning out what he really said
3. framing your arguments calmly
4. injecting your passion into your writing
It's easy, and most common in this forum, to skip from 1 to 4 without even touching the middle two; it's not uncommon to not even really do justice to 1, but to breeze through in a hurry to get your own response on board. But any time you feel the urge to do that, when you're reading more to respond than to understand, it's time to do what JL said: take some time to cool off. Leave the post on the screen, open a new tab and do a post in Fun & Games (my approach), or something else to redirect your thoughts from the emotional track to the rational.
That way we don;t end up afflicting everyone else with posts that are expending a lot of ammunition on targets that don't really exist.
