What ticks you off?

[Cassini90125]

I checked the mail about 20 minutes ago. Guess what I got? A summons for jury duty. They want me to report to the courthouse on June 9th at 8:15 AM. Oh joy! Oh happy day! Isn't this just swell?

Cassini is displeased.

[Sparky]

I had jury duty once (I wasn't picked though). It was annoying but I'd go again if I got another summons.

What ticks me off is the troll we have who keep re-registering after he's banned almost every single day. Everyone, bear with us if you see us deleting a new member's posts, it just means that's him.

[Cassini90125]

The kid is a hemorrhoid on the bowels of humanity.

[Ditchy McAbandonpants]

...sigh...

I guess it comes with the territory of reading message boards, talk page and the like, but I've become increasingly disillusioned and irritated with a certain method of reasoning that you see in debate, discussion and argument, which can be summarised as follows:

"I do not believe X, therefore X is false."

You'll all have encountered this attitude somewhere. You'll all know someone who's guilty of doing it. You'll all have been in an argument where someone attempted to apply this logic. Heck, maybe you'll even be guilty of having done it yourself, at some point in your life; I know I have. As such, I trust that you will all therefore recognise what an entirely self-aggrandising, fallacious and disrespectful stance it is to take on anything, whether you're debating videogames, music, ethics, politics, faith or lifestyle.

I'm not implying that things can never be black and white, or right and wrong, but that's mostly in the case of factual disputes, where one party is less informed than the other; when it comes down to differences of opinion, however, of contrasting beliefs or conflicting personal taste, then I firmly believe there's no excuse (or indeed logical grounding) for trying to imply that someone else is wrong. Doing so tells me either that you're insecure in your own opinion, or else you're arrogant enough to believe you're better than everyone else; in either case, it marks you out as someone who is barely worth listening to, let alone debating with.

Regrettably, however, there remains a huge number of people who seem incapable of expressing their points of view in any other way; this concept that trampling the opinions of others is a necessary part of stating your own case strongly. Therefore, it's not good enough to dislike something, you have to prove that that thing is somehow objectively awful; it's not good enough to believe something yourself, you have to brand as an idiot anyone who doesn't agree with you. Like I said, I know and understand this, because I've been guilty of it myself in the past, when I was younger and stupider, but now I've gotten older and matured a little (I like to think, anyway), I realise that it does nothing to strengthen your own case, and everything to weaken people's perceptions of you as a person. Sadly, it's such a convenient, lazy argumentative shorthand that you get people doing it without really meaning it; just look at the difference in implication between "I really dislike X" and "X really sucks". Both are equally strong, forceful statements, but whilst the first is a subjective judgment call that merely conveys a personal response, the second is broad, confrontational and falsely implies an objective truth. I'm not saying, mind, I would take someone to task for flippantly stating that something "sucked", but I do feel it's indicative of a wider problem...

[Imaginary Light]

Originally Posted by Ditchy McAbandonpants

...sigh...

I guess it comes with the territory of reading message boards, talk page and the like, but I've become increasingly disillusioned and irritated with a certain method of reasoning that you see in debate, discussion and argument, which can be summarised as follows:

"I do not believe X, therefore X is false."

Sounds like that ex-member, megatron01, to me

Okay, what's ticking me off right now is being very, very sleep deprived. And to prove how sleep deprived I am, it took me five tries to spell "deprived." Ugh.

Also, term papers. Yeah, I get it, it's the end of the semester and colleges are all, "YAY TERM PAPER TYME!!!!111SHIFTONE," but bdahjbfbbs come oooonnnn! I can't wait for the end of the semester. Four months off for the summer for the win.

[Ridureyu]

When I went to jury duty, I brought a book.


It was an editor's copy, and thus had dog-eared pages and lots of underlined, circled, and highlighted text, with plenty of corrections written in.


I didn't have to serve.

[taranchula]

Originally Posted by Cassini90125

I checked the mail about 20 minutes ago. Guess what I got? A summons for jury duty. They want me to report to the courthouse on June 9th at 8:15 AM. Oh joy! Oh happy day! Isn't this just swell?

Cassini is displeased.

On the bright side, just be glad it's June 9'th and not say....July 23'rd now that would suck.

[Cassini90125]

Originally Posted by taranchula

On the bright side, just be glad it's June 9'th and not say....July 23'rd now that would suck.

That's probably when the actual case would be heard. It would last exactly one week, and would be something lame like a dispute over the ownership of a snow shovel.

Seriously, I've got good reasons to avoid this, and I'll get out of it. They shouldn't be bothering me anyway; it's too soon for them to ask again since the last time they did so. They need to do a better job of record-keeping.

[Nyo]

Jury duty? What's the case?

(if you're not allowed to tell, it's fine.)

[Cassini90125]

Originally Posted by Nyo

Jury duty? What's the case?

(if you're not allowed to tell, it's fine.)

No case at present. They have to interview me first and determine if I'm suitable for the job before assigning me to a case. The whole thing would be an extremely inconvenient and aggravating disruption to my life, and I'm not qualified anyway; therefore, they need to go harass someone else.