Spacebunny’s favorite ex-Raider gives an easy lesson in destroying one’s interlocutor. From Dr. Z:
On Sunday Joe Buck, hosting Fox’s pregame show, served us a blind item referring to Johnson as “training dogs to kill.” Howie Long, who maintains journalistic integrity, promptly jumped him on this one. “Training to kill what?” he said. “Where’d that come from?” Buck, true to the instincts of all sound bite airheads, went into a stammering backstroke and bailed out.
It is amazing how many debates one can win by applying two simple measures:
1. Always ask your opponent to explain his open-ended statements.
2. Always be prepared with an answer for the questions that are most likely to be raised by your own statements.
Do those two things and you’ll not only win 90 percent of your debates within the first two minutes, but you’ll usually make the other person look like a drooling idiot besides. It took me a long time to accept how little thought goes into the vast majority of human speech, but now that I’ve finally accepted that the average individual really does suffer from a virtual chromosome disorder, I no longer find myself in a constant state of bemused astonishment.