I often end a debate if it keeps going in circles because it is just a waste of my time. Of course I think I am right ;) but it does not necessarily mean I think the other party is an asshole . In fact I pretty much am very blunt with people I think are ashole and thell them to their face :P
You are young you still have the energy when you get to my age it just makes you want to get a warm cardigan and sip tea away from humans. I no longer hop on my soap box I crawl there 38 years of preaching the same things and seeing but marginal change can make you want to live in a cave forever. What iI fight for is to important so I force myself to still communicate, advocate, do what I can ... but I am old and grumpy now an my stamina just isn't what it was anymore ...
I can understand that, though even in that case I try to explain that exact point ("I feel like we're going in circles and I don't want to dedicate any more time to it") rather than saying "agree to disagree". In many of the cases I was referring to in the post here, it went more like this:
Kenny: 3500 word research paper
FB person:
No other conversation before or after... That is clearly just not wanting to engage in a challenging dialogue.
I feel ya.
The one point I would contend is that I bet there is a lot of the change that you may not have seen or be aware of, because that seems to be the most common thing is folks not being aware of the massive amount of progress that's happening everyday.
facebook person seems not to want to even bother to read what you said.
as for progress yes there is some but it is so slow compared to what it could be . Example one of my mother's lovers built a fully functional prototype of a solar car when I was 7 that was 43 years ago. One of the big oil companies bought his work and shelved it. there are so many more stories like this it is just really sad ... also progress seems to ebb and flow until it sticks somewhat it is tiring ...
Ya, that seems to be the most common use of "agree to disagree", at least that I've experienced. Someone won't bother to read what I wrote, or will sort of glaze over while I'm talking, then decide that we should just agree to disagree.
Oh ya, I mean we had awesome electric cars 120 years ago, of course the corporatocracy has allowed that sort of thing to get big... Though at the same time it's important to note that they usually shut these things down because the inventors are willing to sell it to them. If they weren't trying to get paid, the corporations wouldn't have control of so many patents.
Nowadays, every inventor who actually wants to help needs to be putting things out open source, and the more designs that can be 3D printed, the better it is for everyone on Earth.
Agreed I am a big fan of open source. i was so excited when I first cme to steemit because I was hoping we could foster alternative science here and engineering- finance it with steem on the contingency that everything developed would be open source .. sadly steem at this point in time is just a reflection of the outside world but I still hope that can be changed because the potential is there to be sooo much more ...