Trading Insults for Arguments

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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

Imagine a scenario in which a person makes a logical argument for their belief, let’s call them person A. Now, the validity of that argument isn’t what I’m considering, just their approach to trying to persuade other people of an idea. So they proceed by calmly and logically articulating the reasons for their beliefs.

Now imagine a person, let’s call them person B, who responds to person A by trading time they could devote to logical arguments of their own with hostility, condemnation, sneering, and insults against person A. Now, they might make some logical arguments of their own, but to either a small or large degree, they choose to supplement those arguments with these kinds of tactics.

Now here’s my question, which for my part, I intend to answer. What does it say about person B that they would choose to respond in that way?
And this is an important question, because this isn’t uncommon, especially here on YouTube. For example, every now and then, someone will forward a video that someone else made in reply to one of my videos, and they almost always feature this approach to refuting my arguments.

I’ve seen responses to my videos in which people make fun of my clothes, or my hair, or whatever – I even saw one atheist channel devote a considerable amount of time to ridiculing my facial expressions and the way I sat down in my chair at the beginning.

So, I’d like to offer some considerations that I think are fair in evaluating these kinds of videos and what it says about the person producing them, as well as their beliefs. I’m also, somewhat selfishly hoping that it will save me the pressure of having to individually respond to videos like that, instead being able to simply share a link to this video in reply.