Wow @evolutionnow, first of all, respect to your own force of power and will that constructs such a tight-knit and walled-in narrative. Lots of effort put in to make it appear water-tight, open-and-shut, black and white, sane vs insane.
However, it is a narrative that is very largely of your own making, where the components of the story are hand-picked and fabricated from your imagination and prejudice, from your own fears and traumas. You present a subjective sliver and you label it the whole. No particular malice, just a deep insecurity it seems to me!
To the observer of this interaction, you have not responded to the substance of @baah's comments anywhere. Your attitudes and values are being challenged and this seems to have elicited an emotional reaction from you. I grant (without intending to be patronising) that it is not easy to look at a mirror, especially one that is held up by a straight-talking (at times abrasive, but by no means always so) voice like @baah's. But if you look closely and objectively, there is no ad hominem, rather a challenge set to you to clarify / explain - or retract (if erroneous and one has the courage to admit it - do you?).
It seems to be the case psychologically, that when people are challenged - especially when cherished beliefs are challenged, that these will be defended at all costs. The response is visceral, it is primarily emotional. Logic, reason, honesty, sincerity, integrity etc all unceremoniously chucked out of the nearest window. This is the picture of your subjective state that your words, responses and interaction present. This is quite transparent! It seems to me that if something is fundamentally sound, it will be able to withstand challenge, or else one can learn something. This, IMO, says a lot about your opinions and belief structures, and your (un)willingness to allow any questioning/challenging of them. Perhaps you are clinging on to them? This position is one of fear, and not many are brave enough to acknowledge the (self)deception. You're actually just holding yourself back!
You do not seem willing to engage with the content of challenge, and instead you yourself fire off numerous ad hominems with the justification that you are returning @baah's fire - this is dishonest, cheap shots if you like :). Did you even flag some of his comments? You resort to infantalisation ("sweetie") and a patronising tone, as well as fallacious slandery of @baah amongst other tactics of distraction from the fact that you refuse to (are afraid to?) engage with the content of his challenge. You actually make a post where you complain about it in the same 'poor me' tones, blaming him for your hurt feelings and constructing a narrative that soothes those hurt feelings by lashing out in a rather directionless frenzy of hands and feet! I'm not ridiculing you - I do not know you. Arguments always tend to show people up in negative light and of course I am sure there is a ton more to you than my observations (which I guess you will dispute anyway!). Besides, as far as I am concerned, you are not your opinions, beliefs etc, however much you may identify with them and think you are @evolutionnow :D.
As for Mr @baah, you call him a troll, I'd kinda agree to an extent, except that I'd add 'Truth'. For he is not the kind of nasty troll you accuse him of being - ie chasing you to hurt your feelings or to push some political agenda - no, he is a Truth Troll, and he challenges bullshit and fakery with - IMHO - great integrity and honesty, as well as consistency and application of intelligence. His style can come across as abrasive, and he likely enjoys sparing, but the ad hominem stuff emanates from those he challenges who just can't take it (like you in this series of interactions!) and seek instead to discredit the force of this challenge eg. calling his genius a symptom of insanity LOL. The 'LOL' is at the irony of what is actually a symptom of your insecurity (your mental illness) calling something else mental illness in order to divert attention from the insanity of your position! YOU project your behaviour onto him and accuse him of doing just that. It may be a game, but it doesn't look very comfortable for you!
this strawman does that ad hominem bullshit all the time and then projects it back at you. he will pretend it was you who could not reply to his question anyway, so no point debating with him. I do it only because I like describing his illness publicly until he will leave peaceful people alone :D
Below another example, and here you seem to be inviting him. Would you agree that there is confusion in your presentation of self? It looks as if you may be responding with symptoms of your own 'illness' - certainly the 'post' you made out of it suggests this - you are the 'Empire' right? You are the one who therefore has the narcissistic and magalomaniacal power to define ABSOLUTE REALITY and to say what is what....right?
this guy is beyond repairing. he is trolling my posts now. I like it though. He inspires me to reply to his illness and make a post out of it.
If you think nobody else agrees with my regard for @baah, have a look at the numbers following him! His is indeed a rare voice on Steemit, with a sharp edge that slices through much wishy-washy bullshit, rubbing abrasively against its numerous sentimentally-minded proponents!
Best wishes
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Allegory of an interaction:
Mr X: Hey, Mr Y cycling along there, listen up you wobble-head, your rear wheel looks buckled to me and here's why, take a look!
Mr Y: Fuck you Mr X, mind your own business, look at your own fucked-up bike first. I'm cycling along already or are you blind? My bike is perfectly fine without blemish or flaw and I don't need your bullshit observations. I'm great. I refuse to even look, or acknowledge because you are a fool and a lunatic for calling me a wobble-head.... attack attack attack
Mrs Observer: hmmm, what about the buckled back wheel then, will it just remain buckled?
Very well played. I wonder how did you find these comments and what made you get involved... must have been a hell out of coincidence ;) Are you one of his minions? :D I appreciate your opinion. Very well said. Nice tone. I find that I did answer his "issues". Please kindly point which ones I haven't next time, to someone else, because there won't be a next time... Let me explain why. If you ask something in the wrong way, it is impossible to answer. I do not feel insecure, threatened... or whatever your "psychology" from a pharmacy leaflet makes you believe... I dealt with many delusional people like that. I debated probably close to a 100 statists by now. So did most of voluntaryists. The concept is very simple and yet, somehow it is very hard to grasp for believers in a collective. All I am saying is that I do not believe in your beliefs. For example, I do not believe in democracy. Majority discriminating minority is just not for me. To me it is nothing but a gang-rape. Please respect it. Don't use some collective belief in something I do not believe in to prove I'm wrong. You can think it is dumb. I really don't care. This is the point I am making; I am an individual. If someone is saying "I do not wish to choose this to be a part of my life" and there is someone who says I am dumb, because... whatever he might invent, this is where an argument ends and the "genius" needs to be separated. I distance myself from pompus "oracles" with ridicule, even though I know it will never work. Ignoring is the best thing one can do... and as you can see, this is what my smarter colleagues do. It is not that we cannot reply to his nonsense. It is that there is noone to hear the reply. It is literally a religion, a sect, a form of cult. Reasoning with these arguments is like trying to reason with a Christian by telling him "Jesus does not exist". It will always turn into what it turned into ;) Your argument that @baah has a lot of followers is as silly as all you wrote (although, I appreciate the professional tone). Hitler also had loads of followers..
But @larkenrose or Ron Paul or Rothbard, Mises Institute, have quite a few too and I subscribe to the ideology they subscribe to, which is non-aggression and a voluntary society. Even Friedman makes much more sense to me, but I still think he is wrong we need any kind of gov. I choose ideas of Noblists over your hero. If someone is unable to undertstand this... there is no point wasting time to reply to his strawman logic. If you are unable to get it, you are in the same cult and I also do not see any reason to reason with you... seems pointless. Check out Larken's "candles in the dark". Maybe this will wake you up. I'm not as good at explaining the obvious to statists as he is.
Your analogy is completely wrong. I see it the other way around. I used to be like @baah. Almost every voluntaryist was like that. We were all statists... well, I believe everyone is an anarchist, but needs to melt away the layers of indoctrinated propaganda first to understand that. We did not regress. We understood something, but some people are just unable... it is fascinating to me. Was the "debate" in a very poor tone? Could I try harder, give it better, psychological approach? Sure! But I would do it for someone I respect or if my intention wasn't to ridicule a statist. I do not respect @baah. If you say I am bad because I used patronizing "sweetie" when being called a moron, idiot and whatever else (not that I did not do it before to him), you are also kind of delusional, and I choose to not continue this discussion with you, as I already learned all I wanted to learn from the exchange with your friend. There is no confusion of myself. You are confused with me. I am my belief in this realm. I know I am a free human.
https://steemit.com/spirituality/@evolutionnow/truth-hate-speech-of-conspiracy-theorists
You also seem to have a great regard for someone who cannot answer simple questions without some convoluted craziness to make sense out of your cult's wishy-washy beliefs. It doesn't seem like he is such an aware higher being as you picture him. Or maybe the insults and foam dripping from his yap, the inability to let go distracted me from noticing... I am guilty of lowering myself to his level. Something I'm working on. BTW, you are using a platform created by a Voluntaryist Dan Larimer... he dumb too? I'll stick with geniuses, you do what you think is right. All the best to you