Re: Another BMW marketing-engineering-legislation quandary - Pedestrian Protection
While I did not study philosophy, my understanding of sparking and fuelling an argument on the basis of provoking thoughts previously unherald of, stems from my reading on fallacies. And strictly on your arguments alone, while built on strong advocacy and extensive research, are prepositioned on a weak, but not fallacious, cause. Had you position yourself with a slightly more relevant topic, you will not be met with a flurry of negative responses, but might be successful in stirring the sublimal thoughts of such relevant issues.
Like what I've mentioned in my Newton Food analogy, had someone used hygience (dead rat, cockroaches) as a basis of arguing against going there, it will invoke a more active response to align thoughts against patronising Newton, rather than sticking to the campaigning against the usage of styrofoam plates and plastic spoons. The same agenda to boycott Newton (justification of that agenda is subject to scrutiny on a separate argument), but different bases of argument. Same here. This topic, while inherently sound, logical, and invoking, could not make most forumers relate to you. In this respect, you have failed terribly, insofar as your agenda (whatever it might be) is concerned. Instead, everyone questioned your motives.
2 examples to show that you stumbled on your argument:
One, "Travelling fast is not fundamentally illegal, but if you can incur personal liability when travelling fast without the capacity to handle safe fast driving. I did not promote legislation against fast driving, and promoted de-legislation instead, but still fully subject to liability." Now prior to this advocacy, you mentioned your detestment on drink-driving - with "objective" moral judgement. A necessary no. But you do realise that drink drivers - like speedsters - always think they have the capacity to handle the car?
In other words, you could also phrase the sentence as "Drink driving is not fundamentally illegal, but if you can incure personal liability when driving intoxicated without the capacity to handle safe fast driving." How does that sound? A weaker argument? In fact, when you detest drink driving and support lifting speed limits, to a certain extent you are contradicting yourself. The merits of your arguments diminished as one would question your integrity.
Two, statements like "... people should buy BMWs ONLY for the driving enjoyment they have (thanks to Eggz for clarifying this concept in my mind) and if they buy it for anything else other than driving enjoyment as the top priority, they are POSEURS, and I hate POSEURS more than anything else." served to sweep many BMW drivers into your own peculiar way of generalisation. Doing so repeatedly will only brand yourself as a harbinger of anti-BMW semitics. If you are indeed game for a healthy two-way conversation, you should refrain from using emotionally-charged labels on our fellow forumers.
michaeltan said:
Kenntona, you have a unique understanding of the situation. And majorly, assuming you didn't mix up the speakers, what you say is very very close to the truth I do not usually dig so deep in myself to find.
Hippie view or not, astrology being true or not, I do this incomprehensively and intuitively. Another side of me is that I live on friendly, impersonal debate. I always learn from debates, and learn much slower any other way.
I do not wish to convert you to my way of thinking. I merely want negative responses to my post, so that we can debate. And it does not matter to me whether the people opposed to my views are eventually converted or not, because that is for yourself to do, not me. I am totally satisfied that I raised these points, you guys read it and understood 60% of my message, planted the seed of controversy in your mind, and let it at least remind you in the background of my message.
Before anybody misunderstand me (not you, Kenntona, you understand me perfectly I think), thinking that I stir controversy for the sake of controversy and condemn me for being an attention seeker, that's an inaccurate view IMHO. If I wanted attention (my god, there is too much attention in some other IT forum!) I would not bother to do it in such a negative way. I want the knowledge, I want to develop my forumming skills to a high level, and in the process, I want to learn, by googling, more on important issues without the usual boring study methods.
There are issues which are important in this world, and I love to see these issues be implanted in the minds of intelligent people, of which the best approximation of the concept of `intelligent people' I know of in car forums, is here in the BMW forum.
