It's not that I'm singling you out particularly, Don, yours was just the latest post devoted to arguing with WAV when I happened to take a look today. Nothing more to it than that.

I am not engaging in colorless neutrality here. I am observing something which I think is rather obsessive-compulsive and which goes on here on Mudcat all the time: people endlessly wrangling with other people over various things which are never going to be resolved, because their resolution would require someone submitting himself finally to the will of another and admitting that he is "wrong", in effect surrendering unconditionally...and most people simply are not willing to do that (for obvious psychological reasons).

Nor are countries...unless forced to by violence.

This is not a war, however, it's a conversation. Nothing is at stake here except some illusory sense of triumph for someone's ego because they just managed to argue someone else into submission (or so they think).

To note this is not to strike a pose of "neutrality" in the argument. It is to observe and comment upon the frailties of the human ego.