I was trying to say that it's just a message board. It should never be more important than real life, but I sometimes get the feeling that you treat it rather more seriously than that, and that's where I don't want to go. That is what I don't want to touch.
As for trusting me, why should you? Do you need to? I don't trust or distrust you, but I do find your posts entertaining and worthy of thought. Isn't that why we are here?
Where's the irony?
The irony is that some degree of trust is required when you have a bunch of really stubborn people. All the evidence in the world wasn't resolving this callout between Richard and Callaway. Neither Richard nor Callaway would drop it, even though the horse was ridiculously beyond dead. It was like an endurance game, who could hold onto blind stubbornness longer, or would it get blabberized or locked to stop the madness. And the thing that's missing in all that is trust, simple trust for somebody's word.
I get that it's only a message board to you. I do treat it more seriously than that because I don't see much difference between online life and offline life. It's people on the other end, regardless of whether you can see or hear them. I wouldn't say that a blind and deaf person had less of a life than a sighted and hearing person, because they communicated only through text, and in the same way I won't say that someone in front of their computer has less of a life than someone sitting in a group of friends. (I acknowledge there's as much stupid drama offline as online, it just presents differently, so I don't mean that all stupid drama is of life-threatening import.)
At any rate, trust. I would like to trust you on some level because it would allow me to continue having interesting arguments without it having to devolve to inane tactics like spamming or blabberizing or blatantly disregarding evidence. As the system is currently set up, those things are the inevitable results of arguments where people won't back down. But if there could be some kind of fundamental trust between comrades... not sure what word to use here, since clearly not everyone is friends, but you don't need to be friends with someone to treat them with respect... if it could be acknowledged that a degree of trust is necessary to have a functional community where everyone has the right to say what they want, then I think it would benefit this place as a whole.
