The Question and Answer Board

[NorthWesterner]

If someone says
something I disagree with, I don't slap some duct tape on their mouth. I refute them.

That's fine if it's something where refutation is possible.

On another board, which shall remain nameless, someone posted something about a dead person that I thought was untrue but they couldn't prove it. So to demonstrate the difficulty of proving a negative, I posted "You can't prove you aren't a pedophile."

Which aroused a storm of controversy. I was accused of having actually called the person a pedophile, which of course I hadn't. But the fact that he got so upset certainly proved the point I was making, that it's not easy to refute certain statements. If I HAD made it as a direct accusation, how could he refute it otherwise than denying it, and that proves nothing because even if he were one he would deny it.

The successor to the thread monitor, who had been let go in one of the dummer decisions that other unnamed board had made, got involved and deleted it, calling it a personal attack. Which it wasn't, but I guess the successor wasn't bright enought to understand the concept of hypothetical argument.

But the point is that if I had made the actual accusation, how could one refute it?