Animation Source Forums

As we all know, heated debate has been common for the forums recently. We all love a debate and to add our opinions, confer and learn stuff from others' replies.

However, there's been a bit of a trend where one person or a group of people become unhappy with the way the debate is going, claiming everybody is being unfair on them, and they start their own spin-off topic or rant centered around their point of view. Most of the time these usually just derail back onto the subject of the previous thread they were first unhappy with.

The problem? In debates AND rants you're meant to take other's points into consideration. However, this just doesn't seem to happen. Now I'm not saying all of these threads turn out like this - some of them turn out well, which makes them interesting. Which is what rants and debates are meant to be. But a lot of them turn into useless bickering, which means the topic is locked, thus a waste of valuable time we already have.

Point is, if you're going to start a rant or debate, or participate in one, you have to be open to other's opinions, or, let's face it, you shouldn't be in them at all.

[Please note this isn't exclusively directed at anyone, just a general rant. Anyone is free to say what they wish.]

I couldn't agree more. Debates are fine if you try to accept that everyone is not going to agree with you. I personally find other people's points of view more interesting than my own.

But of course! It raises awareness |O

Good point. Today's popular culture is so centered around the idea that there is only one truth, that you're either right or wrong and that everyone should say what they think and don't care about what others say/think, that we somehow lost the idea that there exist things like 'consensus', 'compromise' and finding common ground.
Some things are true, some things are wrong, but most are somewhere in between. And on those issues, you have to be willing to keep an open mind and seek compromise now and then in stead of just beating others over the head with empty one-liners.