Listen! posted 1/28/2009 10:24:24 PM | 4 kudos what's this?     report abuse

Nightowl001

I'm not going to hunt down a link to the quote, and the veracity is actually less important than the point, but I was told that T.A. Edison once said "Every man is my master, in that I may learn from him." So, despite their apparent over-zealousness and single-mindedness,

So, I listen to Rev. Jesse Jackson, and sometimes hear something he says that strikes a chord with my personal beliefs, i.e. "Abortion should be legal, safe, and rare."

I listen to Bill O'Reilly, and agree with him sometimes. If I may paraphrase: "Pointing to someone else's bad behavior is no excuse for your own bad behavior. Now you're just both behaving badly."

I even listened to shrub a time or two. And I don't remember now about what; but I remember thinking to myself that the universe must have been knocked off its axis or something, or perhaps I was ill, because I actually listened to him say something that I thought made a little bit of sense for a change.

I listen to Rush from time to time, if only to better coalesce my arguments against his positions. (I might agree with something he says at some point, but there is so much chaff, I decided long ago it wasn't worth the effort to winnow out the too-rare grains of wheat.)

So, in a way, you could say many of those people "influence me," if only because my passive interaction with their words has led me to think about things and come to my own conclusions.

To dismiss out of hand anything someone says, without actually listening and considering it, is an ad hominem argument that basically says "I don't like you (or the group you belong to, or the way you look, or the language you speak, or whatever 'reason'), so you must be wrong." We may actually chose the target of an argument, the person we are going to argue with, based on the fact we do not like them, but without actually having a valid criticism and arguable facts, there is no intelligent debate, but rather only a display of bigotry and ignorance.

Another favorite quote of mine is attributed to the frontiersman, Davy Crockett. “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.”

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