After discussing topics with those of contrary opinion here, I often come away with the distinct feeling that "I know the other person is wrong, but I really don't want to continue discussing the topic because they're acting like assholes and they aren't really teaching me anything anyway." I come here to engage in discussion which involves persuasion -- in Habermas's terms, communicative action -- and I don't really care very much about anyone's desires for combative interaction, though if you piss me off I might occasionally be tempted to say so. (Yeah, so what.) So here are some tips on Internet persuasion -- designed more or less for DailyKos.com -- and intended more or less to weed out those who aren't really worth a response because they've shown they're uninterested in persuasion.
(CAVEAT: Discussions and debates are fundamentally based on desires, and for the most part the desires which find their expression on the political Internet are based on opinion-confirmation. DailyKos.com is designed so that people can come here to find opinions with which they agree -- generally a sort of conservatism-with-a-liberal-face (in the sense in which Erving Goffman used the term "face") -- so they can cheer for their side as if DailyKos.com were perpetually engaged in some sort of debating "sporting" contest against RedState or something like that. That's not a meaningful reason to have a website -- it's a reason which has to be adorned with all sorts of other reasons to give it meaning. For the most part I've decided to work around it in my participation here. A better reason for having a website from my perspective would be to find out the truth about politics, and to decide upon some sort of appropriate set of actions to deal with that truth. But this isn't my website. At any rate, please just keep in mind as you read this that DailyKos.com is not network TV, and that we are neither Tom Brady nor Russell Wilson.)
The whole opinion-confirmation thing evokes in me an apathy as pure as distilled water. I'm not interested in cheering on my side of the debate, but rather in improving what counts as "my side." At any rate, here are what, to me, count as a list of prerequisites for persuasion.
Think of this list of tips as like a list of old edicts proclaimed long ago by a Roman Emperor. If (in the historical record) there appeared an edict against a particular activity, say for instance Honorius's edict of 397 CE against the wearing of breeches of barbarian design, this tells us, today, that a lot of people were in fact wearing breeches of barbarian design back then. If it had to be prohibited, that means it probably happened. By the same token, if the blusterers here once failed to persuade in a particular way, their specific failures will be recognized in the tips for persuasion suggested here. At any rate, here are my tips: