Steve Benen wrote a sharp post this morning that includes the concept of “conversation enders”:
The Birthers. I call them “conversation enders.” These are comments that lead you to know, the moment you hear them, that the writer/speaker is either clueless or intellectually dishonest, and there’s really no reason to engage the person in a serious dialog.I like the concept and the phraseology. In my youth, I used to get my jollies by engaging people with whom I disagreed in loud arguments about things like religion, politics and the like. These days, I have very little tolerance for engaging people who don’t at least ascribe to a baseline set of principles (e.g. honesty, acceptance of formal logic, ability to recognize contradictions, etc.). What’s the point in having a conversation with someone only to find that they literally believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago?I suspect we all have them. When I hear, “Tax cuts are fiscally responsible because they pay for themselves,” it’s a conversation ender. When I hear, “Evolution is just a theory,” it’s a conversation ender. When someone says, “Global warming can’t be real because it’s cold outside,” it’s a conversation ender.
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(THE GRAPEVINE
A few of my personal favorites:
- When the person uses the word freedom as if it were punctuation.
- When the words statist and collectivism are used as insults.
- When someone uses some variation of the phrase, "I know it in my heart"
- Most uses of the word Big as a prefix. i.e. big pharma, big science, big hollywood.
- and when someone refuses to talk without injecting neologisms. For example: obamessiah, defeatocrat, libtard, etc, etc.
good ones
Ahh yes, the conversation enders. I recently experienced those, although I didn't see them as convo enders -- and instead carried on the debate as if some good would come of it. Sadly, I soon realized that the debate turned ad hominem and therefore pursuing such a silly conversation was pointless.