It's Not Personal!

This is just a general preface to the posts I write, to emphasis that I will never make any criticisms I make of ideas, opinions, attitudes or actions personal. The 'person', the human being, is always something different, something not wholly defined, by any of their writing, speech or actions. I therefore engage with the ideas, objectively. In doing so, I may say something like 'this argument deserves no respect', but in doing so I never mean that the person who has put forward the argument deserves no resepct. I keep the two separate. An argument holds still and can be assessed in and of itself. A person is far more complex and in some ways impossible to assess, and also may chnage their opinions and actions very radically. It strikes me as an extremely misguided tendency of our contemporary culture to conduct debate on a personal level, and bring a personal animus to may issues. I'm at pains to avoid that, but at the same time I will not hold back when delivering my opinion of ideas.