I recently engaged with Krossfire in what could eventually become a debate and thought expanding upon that might be useful to a casual reader and purveyor of truthiness. Taking a break from my memories has suddenly become somewhat appropriate.

I’m writing this on a rooftop, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, after having sunbathed for a few hours. The sun has gone behind the high-rises, after I had a cig and an apple cider, leaving me in the shadow and with nothing better to do than..

..restart this on a rainy day.

If you have followed this blog at all, you may have noticed that I tried harder than perhaps the average blogger to have a debate. My moderate to low level of success has perhaps to do with the fact that while I love formal or competitive debates (db8.zamo.ca), “polemics” or “galceve” tend to bore me. So when debates are so important and so exciting, why is it that nobody (other than Quebecoisfier in Deb8 I: legalizarea drogurilor) is debating online and nobody took advantage of the prizes I offered?

For one thing, even though some Romanians continue to win debating competitions – for instance, the Romanian team won second prize in World Academic Debating in Chennai, India, 2014 – many still don’t know what debating is, nor have they ever experienced the thrill of live debating.

On the road to debating Nirvana, people start usually wanting to win, they fail miserably the first few times and if they persevere, they reach a point where winning is not all that important, especially when debating for fun; what’s more important is understanding and discovering what people think and why do they think the way they do.

Apart from expanding my horizons, debating helped me understand a few eternal and somewhat pointless polemics, such as that between religious / faithful (mostly of Christian persuasion) and atheists. For the most part, the former tend to have been indoctrinated since they were little and, being more docile, grew into it and learned to use their “faith” as an anti-anxiety tool. The latter tend to be more rebellious and, for the most part, have gone through the same indoctrination but found a way out. Both are stuck in a loop – the former rejecting anything faithless as morally depraved and anxiety-inducing, unable to imagine that life can exist and go on just fine outside their system of beliefs, while the other group, having made this “jump”, are always trying to convince the others that it can.

There is also homophobia and tolerance, with a group of people historically designated as the recipient of disdain and target of often cruel jokes, and [mostly] the men who feel the need to engage in this hatred in order to control their own latent homosexual urges. There is a similar problem with drug use, with a large number of people fearing their own inability to avoid addiction if recreational use becomes somehow more socially accepted.

I feel I should stop the flow of revelations here and share with you the perspective of a debating champion previously used (again) as an example. In a recent article on Contributors.ro, Dan Cristea writes about how expertly a medical clinic is advertising its services and how it differentiates itself (dc-wysiwyg). Clicking on his name you can read a few more articles in the same calibre. And if you’re wondering, he is the managing associate at Tuca, Zbarcea & Asociatii, a law firm that obtained a new record of individual recommendations in 2013.

Perhaps the best example of this “expertize fallacy” (widely known under the more “expert-sounding ”ipse dixit”) is Krossfire’s article and the conversation I had with him. What makes it special, even though I disagree with it, is the author’s excellent ability to keep the conversation going.

More on that, soon enough.

Sources / More info: krossfire-have-u-heard, disc-collide, twt, img, cartoon, dc-wysiwyg