Because of the nature of rrrrr's rebuttal, it's safe to assume he started reading the comment, didn't care to finish, and jumped to the conclusion that I'm some asshole who hates anyone that doesn't have the same opinion as me. So I decided to put something that might make him take a second look at my comment. But there's no point in doing that if he's just going to ignore that too, so I formatted the first line identical to his in an attempt to catch his attention. Granted, calling the author of the link retarded isn't the best way to open an honest critique of his argument, but high profile bloggers who post flawed arguments with long words and sensationalized phrases irk me.
Whatever you call it, it is overly harsh. It puts any person on the other side at unease.
I do not have the ability to speak for rrrrr, but I assume that an apology would be good enough. Frankly I am very happy with a cessation of the argument.
Fair enough, I was a little hasty to jump on that. I had been primed by coming from a discussion on reddit where they were calling the writer similar things because he is a moral realist. I was expecting another "moral realism is obviously stupid" response and that coloured my reading of your post. Yes, you have a fair point that these definitions have to be simplified as a teaching tool for young kids, so perhaps we shouldn't be taking them quite as an expression of the educators' deeply held philosophy. But it is so easy to tilt people's thinking by the way we frame the debate through terminology that I'm still a little wary of these definitions and of the exercise that requires children to decide whether something is an opinion or a fact. Such an exercise could be valuable as a way of starting a discussion but if it suggests to kids that this is a judgement we should be able to make just by looking at the statement, before engaging in debate about the statement's content, then that's an insidious pernicious effect.