FMF - do you think he is a good debater?

Originally posted by generalissimo
Yes, or No, and why?

this is not a personal attack, it just about transparency.

Yes, it is a personal attack.

Is she a good debater? Well, that depends. She's good at being emotionally hostile and aggressive while refusing to answer anything when she thinks the answer would not be to the benefit of her politics. This sort of thing might be useful in a cutthroat face to face formal debate or court case in which swaying opinion and discrediting others is more important than mutual enlightenment.

However all she's got are attacks and venom. I don't agree with all the people here who thinks she raises many good points or explains her points well. I think it's bizaare that anyone thinks she "gets right to the crux of debates". She attacks and attacks and evades questions. It seems that FMF is looking to 'win', whereas some of the rest of us are more interested in finding the truth expressed clearly and logically, even if the it means we're wrong.

Originally posted by shavixmir
So, you're saying somebody can only be a great debator if the argument can be substantiated...

What about people debating God?
Or people debating morality?

Surely the way one argues something is more important than the actual substantiation?

You could, for example, suggest that if you drop a plate from 10 meters high it will never hit the floor. ...[text shortened]... r (or anything else for that matter), you can't base debating prowess on substantiation.

Your logic is flawed. Each time you cut the distance, you need to also cut down the time. Once you get down to infinite points of space...well you have infinite points in time for the plate to spend falling through them.

You might want to study some calculus.

Originally posted by kmax87
I think that he is far more than reasonably informed. The problem for most Americans on this forum is that he takes a consistently anti-corporate, anti laissez faire, anti libertarian point of view, which sees him cop a lot of *abuse*.

Now whether or not that justifies him returning the favour to his *attackers* I suppose is part of the reason for this de ...[text shortened]... erving to have administered on them, the full measure of his wrath. At least to some extent. 🙄

My problem with FMF has nothing to do with her positions. My problem is how she chooses to discuss them.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
My problem with FMF has nothing to do with her positions. My problem is how she chooses to discuss them.

Her?

Originally posted by Palynka
Her?

Quite - he declared his gender a while ago - which makes one wonder why the 'confusion' persists...

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
A good point follows logically from a set of mutually agreed upon premises.

In utopic fantasy land maybe that's relevant.

A perfect debate is one where both discussants can trace back from their disagreement until they find the first logical flaw or the first set of premises upon which they disagree.

Originally posted by kmax87
The answer lies partly in the way the paradox is framed. The falling a half distance at every stage is meant to introduce an infinite series of falls, each half the distance of the previous fall. What that may not tell you, is that the plate reaches the floor in the limit of that infinite sum, and that it reaches it pretty rapidly.

btw shav, what I didnt include in this observation of Xeno's paradox, was that as the plate begins its series of infinite half falls, the time taken for each half fall becomes shorter and shorter such that in the limiting case as the time for each half fall tends to zero, the plate will have hit the floor. So while the point of a paradox is to challenge logicality, in this case at least ( unless you are willing to challenge the notion of limits) it can be proved logically that the sequence of infinite half falls reaches a finite limit when the time taken for that final half fall equals zero.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
Yes, it is a personal attack.

Is she a good debater? Well, that depends. She's good at being emotionally hostile and aggressive while refusing to answer anything when she thinks the answer would not be to the benefit of her politics. This sort of thing might be useful in a cutthroat face to face formal debate or court case in which swaying opinio in finding the truth expressed clearly and logically, even if the it means we're wrong.

how is it a personal attack?, I didn't insult him.