Just asking...............

 

Here's a wonderful way to avoid an argument—simply ask questions.  Instead of jumping in and disagreeing before you know any more about the subject under discussion and the other party, ask the person to state his case, specifically, and to define his terms.  People who like to argue, and will at the drop of a word on any subject, are people who enjoy ruffling the feelings of others.  Willard Sloan once wrote an article entitled, "Arguments Don't Win Friends" in which he points out that arguments are useless and largely ridiculous.  They're more a matter of temper than temperate conversation and discussion.

-Earl Nightingale, as excerpted from The Essence of Success

The best possible way to.............................

 

......................................argue about politics.

understanding......................

 

They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: "You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do."

-Milton Friedman, as cut-and-pasted from here

wavelets in a ceaseless surf..........

 

     Now Aristotle understands Plato to have held that the universals have objective existence, and indeed Plato had said that the universal is incomparably more lasting and important than the individual,—the latter being but a little wavelet in a ceaseless surf; men come and go, but man goes on forever.  Aristotle's is a matter-of-fact mind; as William James would say, a tough, not tender, mind; he sees the root of endless mysticism and scholarly nonsense in the Platonic "realism"; and he attacks it with all the vigor of a first polemic.  As Brutus loved not Caesar less but Rome more, so Aristotle says, Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas—"Dear Plato, but dearer still is truth."

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

You don't need to be a weatherman......

 

Is there “right-wing misinformation”? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship because we figured we had the better argument.

Obviously, some of you lack that same confidence. You took billions from taxpayers and blew it on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see with their own eyes.

-Matt Taibbi, from here

such a thing as truth..........

 Bagehot held that Gladstone did believe in truth—that is, he believed that there was such a thing as truth—but, like a clever lawyer, he was seemingly prepared to argue either side of a question of what constitutes that truth: "he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate."

-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

Constructive..........................

 

Having a calm mind that is focused on the outcome is our greatest asset when we are in conflict at workplace.

-Tanmay Vora, from this post

the great debates...................

 In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.

-Richard Feynman

need.......................Part 2

 . . . But to conduct political argument as though these factors are too far from the realm of ideas to deserve a mention is to ignore all the limits that must be borne in mind, if our political philosophy is to be remotely believable.  It is precisely the character of modern utopias to ignore these limits - to imagine societies without law (Marx and Engels), without families (Laing), without borders or defenses (Sartre).  And much conservative ink has been wasted (by me among others) in rebutting such views, which can be believed only by people who are unable to perceive realities, and who therefore will never be persuaded by argument.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Grand Tradition

14 ways.............................

 ..............................to start an argument in a bar:

4) Today’s super-hopped IPAs are close to undrinkable.

7) An important moment in civilizational collapse was when they replaced live action Saturday morning kids’ shows (The Lone Ranger, Sky King, Fury, The Cisco Kid) with cartoons.

8) Today we listen to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, not to mention the Beatles, but fifty years from now no one will listen to today’s rap.

12) If we all went back to dressing like people did in the 1940s and 50s the world would be a better place.

13) Notwithstanding a few worthy practitioners like Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism was basically a mistake.

-as extracted from here