[governance] Google's Fight the ITU/WCIT website

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 05:47:28AM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian (suresh at hserus.net) wrote:

> Sir, when responding to any discussion, it is important to consider
> motivations that people have when making points, in order to address
> any points that are made.

I must disagree here. It is often much better to explicitly ignore
even obvious motivations and hidden agendas and respond only to
the arguments explicitly made, following Socrates' dictum that
the value of an argument does not depend on who said it -
even though we of course know that in politics the opposite is
usually closer to the truth. But in politics rhetorics trumps
logic, there's rarely any real argumentation in public.

But sticking to the point, to what is actually said, avoiding
reading between the lines, tends to keep discussion more civil
and constructive. Analyzing other people's motives in a debate
generally makes sense only if you want to impress the audience
rather than find a solution to the issue at hand.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen

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