Rules of Engagement

I hope you can hear me. Before you engage with anyone who is trying to engage with you, first determine whether or not they are approaching you in good faith or in bad faith, and that should be relatively clear right out the gate. Whether or not they are approaching you to spew their own talking points or looking at engagement with you as a platform for spreading their own negative or hostile propaganda against the positions that you take. If it's like that, don't engage. You don't have to engage with everybody.

So for example, if someone comes into my comment section or because they won't do it in face to face anyway. But if someone comes to the comment section and says something like, oh, your prophet was a pedophile, block. Immediately block. This is not a serious person. This is not an intellectual person.

This is not someone who's interested in dialogue, in discussion, in understanding, in anything like that. Because look, if I'm in a disagreement with someone, if I have a disagreement with someone's views or someone's opinion or someone's beliefs and I want to engage with them, I will research the counter arguments to my arguments. That's what they call steel manning the argument. So I know already what they're gonna say in response to what I'm going to say, what their arguments are against my argument. So hopefully, can get all of that out of the way.

And I don't I'm not interested in engaging with someone that I have to recite to them all of the standard easily available arguments, counter arguments to whatever they're saying. You should have already done that. So like on the issue of the marriage of prophet Muhammad to Aisha, there's loads of things already written. There's loads of explanations. There's loads of arguments that have already been put forward.

I'm not interested in wasting or degrading my time by reciting all of those to you. Because anyway, you're not interested in them because if you were interested in them, you would already know them. And either you do already know them and are just wanting me to say them so that you can have your counterpoints and we just exchange talking points and counterarguments and like this. Or you just don't care and you haven't researched it and you just like to throw allegations and hostile propaganda. So I'm not interested.

If you want me to engage with you and this is what you should do to anyone who wants to engage with you, you have to prove to me that you're a serious person, that you're seriously interested in understanding, you're seriously interested in dialogue, you're seriously interested in discussion, and expanding the understanding of both parties. If you're not interested in that, and like I said, that should be clear right out the gate, then I just block. Because I can't waste my time. I can't degrade my time with someone who is the intellectual equivalent of a monkey throwing its own feces. It can't be bothered.