Dismissing people just because they have an agenda is a poor practice. You can easily have an agenda and be correct. And surely listening to people that have no clear agenda can be dangerous too.
Only the derisive talk like yours has an apparent agenda, negating a valid conversation which has spent decades fighting against this form of apparently intentional ignorance.
If you have something to contribute to the content, provide content - else, if you're against agendas, maybe practice not interjecting with yours in such conversations when the adults have them.
I simply tell them, on the record, that I think my topic is more important than their X meeting and why I think that. If they disagree or don't respond, then it's on them.
I'm sorry, but it seems like you also have, if not an agenda, then at least some preconceptions you don't want to adjust. "I'm sure of X" really isn't much of an argument.
I remember a story of a linguist (Dan Everett, probably) working in the Amazon. He tried to convince a speaker of the language he was studying to sit with him for a few hours to help him with his grammar. He offered some fishhooks in return. The guy asked, "do you fish?", to which he replied no, and then the guy looked puzzled and said "then why don't you just give me the fishhooks?"
Yeah, it's really annoying when people expect me to just fall in line without any kind of convincing rationale. Is there a good way to respond to this sort of thing? It is very hard to constructively question heavily politicized issues since all actions are automatically considered to be driven by some kind of agenda instead of honest. While quite often the case, there is usually some honesty mixed in, and it is a shame that this is ignored.
Why should I? Your approach obviously is going to be to make a laundry list of things you don't like and that you'll claim I somehow do like, and aggressively accuse me of all sorts of things if I don't either give up or assert perfect agreement with you.
When someone insists on redefining your position before they'll argue with it, it's a sure sign they have a position they'd like to attribute to you and argue with instead. You've done that twice. I'm not interested.
That doesn't work because if someone reads the best research available on the subject and comes to a different conclusion then people with agendas start the mocking and name-calling in an effort to shut them up.
If you're not willing to engage with arguments by people with an agenda, I don't think anyone needs to hear from you on critically reading and understanding opposing viewpoints, let alone public discourse.
Saying that the thoughts of people affected by policies you claim to support isn't "worth your time" really undermines the idea that you have their best interests in mind.
I despise the tactic of repeating back what other people said - it shows me that the other person isn't really dwelling on what I said, or more often in my experience, are using that to distort what I am saying in order to fit a particular agenda. I rather someone not fake listening in that case and wasting everyone's time.
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