You are doing (with a very light approach, i have to admit) exactly what i said people do, i never diminished the importance of the discussion (you can look at my previous posts...they might surprise you). The analogy was about THE WAY these discussions go...and just as i had to do in many previous post, i need to clarify useless stuff because it's far too common for people to inject their thoughts in other people's posts and read what they want to read into them rather than taking the simplest approach and just read the actual words.
But i get the appeal of "proving people wrong", however misguided that might be.
EDIT: the point is that there is a HUGE problem with the manner in which these issues are both expressed AND received, so to focus on "it's not coca cola and oj, man!!!" out of my previous post, pretty much proves my point and it's also a bit depressing.
P.S. i'm out btw, arguing is the last thing i wanna do. Cheers :)
You said you're out, but for anyone else reading along (or if you do decide to come back later) I'd like to clarify. And I'm trying to take care with my words, but in case it doesn't come across know this: I'm trying to be informative. I don't post a lot because usually I feel like other people have beaten me to it and done it better. I'm chiming in now because I think I can add something of value.
I never said you were diminishing the importance of the discussion. I was pointing out why people were taking issue with your analogy and I was trying to explain how some of the details of this particular conversation make it different from other conversations on this forum. And that aside, you're not wrong that somewhere along the line people start dropping the pretense of civility and that tends to escalate things. And this is a subject that has been trod many times. Many of the regulars who post in these threads and the ones who have been posting in here all day have made their arguments dozens of times and they've gotten grouchy. I don't blame them. I'm assuming that you're posting in good faith. In your original post you said:
"Trying OJ won't kill you once in a while even if you love Coca Cola, maybe it'll turn out you're actually a big fan of OJ and you didn't know it.
On the other hand, nobody should force OJ down anyone's throat or fight to make it the only drink ever."
So I wanted to point out that this is not the kind of discussion where the two things being weighed are on equal footing and it just comes down to preference. And obviously my retort seemed specifically aimed at you since I quoted you, but I responded because I thought it was something that might be relevant to the other people reading along as well since it comes up pretty often.
Regarding your thing about injecting thoughts and reading posts, there's always going to be some interpretation that comes into play when talking with other people whether we intend it or not. Even more so with the written word. For example, you got a bit defensive saying you "never diminished the importance of the discussion" and follow up with the parenthetical which, by my reading, suggests that you were under the impression I'd mistakenly responded since, if I had read your previous posts (I had) I'd realize we had some ideas in common. Then the "But i get the appeal of 'proving people wrong', however misguided that might be" implies to me that you're assuming I replied for the sake of a "gotcha" moment. I didn't. So the hilarious sitcom-esque scenario is in all this is you've asserted that I misread your post when in fact you seem to have misinterpreted mine. And now, like you I'm writing in excruciating detail trying to make sure my tone comes across correctly and you understand there are no hard feelings and I'm not picking on you :)
