I can’t help myself. 

>> Are you in the habit of telling people when and if they have to respond to your comments?

>> Or is this a free forum with free people commenting when and if they choose to?

>> I don’t like the way you too often talk to me, so I choose not to respond.

What a beautiful bow on the exchange. Really brings all this full circle. 

Anyway, Helen, the thing is that you have been responding, very explicitly and at some length, to Robert. The issue is that while you have been responding to him, you have been ignoring his questions. 

There is a difference between, “I have bills to pay (or “errands to run,” as the case may be) so I can’t reply right now,” or “I don’t find engagement with you productive, so I have decided not to engage you,” and “I am going to take time to engage you repeatedly and at length, but in a selective way that just ignores the hard questions you have asked of me.”

The first two are understandable, the later is simply disingenuous. 

This is exactly the BS you tried to pull on me, and again, it’s just intellectually dishonest. 

I’m not sure you are wrong. 

I don’t mean to diagnose anyone in particular in this observation, but my impression is that intellectual dishonestly is often a result of fragility: protecting ego is more important that truth. More plainly: an inability to admit–even to ourselves–that we have erred.

Jonathan Haidt has argued that reason is like a spokesman or lawyer: intuition comes first and reason’s work is to justify our foregone conclusions. This leads us to deceive even ourselves. 

I think he goes much too far in diminishing the role of reason, but I also think he captured a very real dynamic we are all susceptible to, allowing reflex and emotion to dictate the foregone conclusions that reason will defend. I certainly know I have found myself defending something I would not have chosen to defend outside a particular dispute where emotions were high, and even occasionally convincing myself of the indefensible. 

From time to time, that dynamic expresses itself in a particularity remarkable way.