Back at the end of May 2020 I had a conversation with Gregory Humphrey, the author of the Caffeinated Politics blog, this turned out to be an example of a conversation between people that disagree about a point and the conversation went well south of that initial disagreement. Unfortunately this has become far, far too typical in online discussions. This particular conversation was on Humphrey’s Facebook page. The conversation went as follows (screen shot 1):
After that I posted this reply (screen shot 2)…
That reply was deleted multiple times which inspired me to post this (screen shot 3)…
Those last two comments of mine were deleted and then the following appeared (screen shot 4)…
Humphrey subsequently completely blocked me from his Facebook page leaving the thread posted without my final comments. As of today, June 24, 2020 at 12:00 noon the post is still on his Facebook page in the form shown in screen shot 1 above.
Those are the facts exactly as they happened.
Now for my personal opinion on the conversation above.
I personally think that Humphrey is an intelligent man but sometimes he gets overwhelmed and allows his bias to take control of his words and actions; heck no one is perfect but I think Humphrey could do a lot better if he’d let go of his bias. Humphrey’s bias causes him to read things between the lines that simply don’t exist and then he builds false narratives around his own assumptions to attack messengers that stand up to some of the nonsense he writes. Ad hominems and false accusations appear to be a standard fare argumentation tactic with Humphrey. This kind of argumentation builds barriers between people and tribes in society, it’s a cancer to civility. When Humphrey is directly confronted he attacks the messenger, deletes comments and then bans people, it appears that he did a similar thing on his blog which now states “Comments are closed” and publicly announced in a January 15, 2019 blog post titled Comments Section Removed From Caffeinated Politics”. It appears that there were a few months of contentious commentary in the comment sections of his blog from commenters that disagreed with some things in some of Humphrey’s blog posts. From my high horse perch, Humphrey’s repetitive actions make it appear that he’s a rhetorical coward. Disagreeing with Humphrey seems to push him over the edge and bias takes over, why can’t some people simply agree to disagree and then move on in a civil manner. That’s my opinion, others are welcome to have their own opinion.
Continuing the kind of argumentation, similar to what Humphrey has shown, will eat people up and make the ideological divide between people feel like chasm walls that appear to be unbridgeable.
I am completely open to discussions, even those that disagree with my own, and I welcome Humphrey or anyone else to comment on any of my blog post as long as they do so within my stated Comment Policies. I’m absolutely certain that we all have human commonalities that can bridge our ideological differences.
Rant complete.
Society's Building Blocks 
You are not dealing with intelligent life. You are dealing with a virtue signalling, self blinded bigot whose connection to the hive mind has overturned his sense of debate, civil discourse, or objectivity. We may pray for him: words will not work.
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Humphrey/Rivers is an odd duck & difficult to nail down.
He’ll, with gratingly smug sanctimony, slobber word salad, tin-eared Libberish on the one hand, then do something rationally redeemable, like call for Mayor SRC to
RESIGN.
The Gotch was actually going to email him to thank him for this brief flirtation with reason.
Now? Not so much!
The Gotch
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Cornelius Gotchberg wrote, “The Gotch was actually going to email him to thank him for this brief flirtation with reason.”
He’s done that kind of thing before and I think you should email him; these are precisely the kinds of kinds of things that should be encouraged.
After I reread my conversation above with him a few times I thought it was really strange for him to have written that I “have departed so far from rational thought” and later that there’s “a segment of our nation who are so afar from the shore of rational thought”. After the way the conversation progressed it was really clear that Humphrey himself was the one that was not dealing with reality and instead fabricating false narratives based on his own false assumptions so it appeared to me that his statements were, at some level, psychological projection which involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings.
I truly meant it when I wrote, “I personally think that Humphrey is an intelligent man but sometimes he gets overwhelmed and allows his bias to take control of his words and actions…”; in my opinion, his bias takes control a lot.
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