On human relationships

Con: I am not the one playing with ad hominem here. I have only called your assumptions "naive", not "stupid" or "retarded". I have not called you naive or stupid or retarded at all, and have not made any personal attacks on you except those you have imagined for yourself. You, on the other hand, have already called my opening statement "long-winded" and "ranting", deemed my logic "nonsensical" and "vague", and slandered me as being "condescending". You seem determined to deliberately misunderstand what I say and then promptly get offended by it. You do not read with the intent of understanding and then finding a logical rebuttal, but rather dismiss anything I say that you do not like as being "empty rhetoric" and "red herrings". Stop treating me like a child in a debate room. You are sidestepping whole paragraphs I have written with oratorical jargon like "red herring" and "ad hominem". I am not trying to win over an audience, con, and thus I am not trying to toss around "red herrings" in order to confuse or mislead you or anyone. There is no prize at the end of this debate except the responses you can give me. If you will stop jumping down my throat and actually read what I say, then I am sure that your innate talent at debating will actually show. Instead, you come across as being overly anxious to point out whatever trivialities you can get your jaws on. At step ALPHA, you will find that I've prepared something for you. You were waiting for an answer to one of your questions. This was your question: "1. A question for pro: to our knowledge, are meaningful friendships and relationships formed OUTSIDE of our species?" Outside of our species, con. That is the question you asked. I tried to answer as best as I could: I thought you must be referring to pets, for they are animals OUTSIDE OF OUR SPECIES with whom we share relationships. You gave me a grammatically-faulty question and then got worked up when I gave you the correct answer to your question. I think you were trying to ask, "Within the human species, despite nationalistic tendencies, do you believe that there are still meaningful liaisons between different peoples?" I believe that they exist, despite nationalities, but only on a very small, personal level, because of factors like distance and the difficulty of communication between most nations. As such, these small connections cannot overcome the wider, more powerful abstract concept of "nations". Imagine, con, that you have a pen friend in Japan, with whom you have been close friends with for many years. One day, the Japanese suddenly bombed Pearl Harbor and were declared enemies of the United States. Imagine that this Japanese boy fits all the criteria of what it means to be a true friend of yours. However, the U.S has drafted you into the Marines and has assigned you to bomb the town your friend lives in. You are given an agonizing decision: which is real and important? The true closeness between you and your Japanese friend, or the larger, more abstract concept of the United States of America? Where do the social circles fade and begin? THAT is what I have been driving at all along, and what you would've realized if you had read my debates and not dismissed them as red fish. You would have seen it in my analogy of the playground, and the abstractness of what it means to belong to a certain group. You would have seen it in my "Mark Twain" closing statement. You would have seen it in my paragraph concerning "Nothing is true, everything is permitted". You would have seen it after my parallel of the Muslim captain and the soldiers. You would have seen it in my second paragraph concerning how "society has warped the notion of human bonding". You would have seen all this, but you were determined to see me as trying to confuse you with "red herrings". This leads us to Step ALPHA that I have prepared for you. STEP ALPHA: RESOLUTION: I believe that societies have warped our understanding of human bonding. There is no such thing as a "sacred friendship", because anything good and pure we try to make of our relationships always ends up being a pawn of nationalistic tendencies and naive classifications of social class and caste within and between nations. INHERENCY: The way the world is structured now has cost us many wars against other people. One prime example would be the Great War or World War I: http://www.cusd.chico.k12.ca.us... Because of the idea of "alliances" (fancy word that, in essence, means "friends within specific circles"), nations declared war on other nations that they had no quarrel with, specifically because that nation had declared war on its ally. You can see the tangled webs they wove. PROPOSAL: If we were to promote a general understanding that "nations", "social circles", "religious groups", and any other abstract notion of formalized (not personal) social bonding, only have as MUCH POWER OVER US AS WE GIVE THEM, then there will be no more tragic events such as 9/11 and the World Wars. Instead of full-scale pitting of large groups of people against large groups of people, now there will only be the individual conflicts that result from an incongruence of personalities. With Step ALPHA as your guide, con, I demand that you re-read my past posts and give me an honest answer. You will find that I have already expounded extensively on the theory of human relationships to the point of overflow. For con: http://www.debate.org... If it interests you, here is a debate that actually concerns nihilism. Note how "Puck", the contender, does not dismiss his opponent as being nonsensical despite his opponent's obvious struggle with the weighty concept of nihilism, but rather chooses to debate honestly and give equal weight to his opponent's arguments; and then proceeds to dismantle them.