This is Part Two of a Discussion on Argument and Debate.  You might also want to read Part One. I don’t usually go back and forth with people in YouTube comment sections. Comments are a healthy, liberating forum for millions of people, and I don’t deny that at all. I do find that the pseudo-courage supplied by digital anonymity makes it too easy for discussion to morph quickly into personal disparagement of the ‘so’s your mother’ variety; but the web is what it is, the good outweighs the bad. I will occasionally make a sarcastic rejoinder [...]

Most of us don’t argue very well. I’m not talking about the “…so’s your mother” type of argument — most of us do just fine there; I’m talking about debating points of disagreement in politics, economics, or anything where facts are in dispute and abstract reasoning has to come into play. Now, I should declare my biases here. Unlike Aristotle, I do not believe that man is, in his deepest depths, a rational animal. Nor do I believe that most people, much of the time, will change their most deeply held convictions on the basis of even [...]