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by the_af 2722 days ago
@chaostheory

> Unless you're a summary bot, most people inject their opinion when summarizing an article.

That's not the purpose of a summary. My opinion is that it was "interesting" and wanted to move the conversation back on track, away from Jackie Chan's martial abilities and back on the subject of the submitted article.

> ok, let's pretend you didn't agree with article. It doesn't take away from the fact that my comments just strongly disagreed with the idea of Jackie "paying too high a price for success"

I've no problem with that. I can understand your disagreement. As I said, I agreed with parts of the article, disagreed with others, found other parts irrelevant, and found some interesting -- as in "meriting further discussion".

Do you see that I'm upset not about whether we disagree on Jackie Chan's life (why would that bother me?) but because you built a nice strawman, lumping my opinion with that of the author as if we were of a single mind, and proceeded to attack that? It's offensive and it's usually an underhanded debate tactic.

Had you answered "I disagree with the author because <reasons>", I wouldn't have had any problem. Instead, you wrote "I'm not sure what point you and the author are trying to make". I'm willing to believe that was a mistake, if you'll simply say "ok, I made a mistake. I was in disagreement with the author."

1 comments

> nstead, you wrote "I'm not sure what point you and the author are trying to make". I'm willing to believe that was a mistake, if you'll simply say "ok, I made a mistake. I was in disagreement with the author."

1. I am not mistaken. Your opinion of Jackie Chan "paying too high of a price" for his fame is an idea that the author shares. It is literally written throughout the article that you summarized. It's effectively part of your summary.

2. Even if the first point wasn't true, and you have the unlikely and uncommon habit of quoting things that you have no opinion over; it doesn't matter. I was still arguing against your opinion of Chan paying a high price for fame. Your focus on whether or not the author had the same idea serves as a distraction from you either not being able to come up with an effective counter argument, or maybe even changing your opinion since it seems like you are distancing yourself from it.

"I'm not sure what point you are trying to make"

Happy?