Recently, ESPN commentator, Keith Olbermann, did a segment on his show about what he called “batting practice,” or the way we attack the people we disagree with on social media — indiscriminately swinging for the fences.

He discussed this after he had a blunder on Twitter in which he accidentally called Penn State students fundraising efforts for pediatric cancer “pathetic.” (The full segment can be found on the Keith Olbermann YouTube channel.)

This is a major problem in the way we argue on the Internet and in our lives. More and more, people aren’t trying to fight ideas; they are trying to fight people. This limits the opportunities we have to grow.

The game “Social Justice Warriors,” covers this perfectly. In the game, you play as a person on the Internet arguing for social justice, against racist, sexist and other various types of trolls.

You can, of course, choose to attempt to argue rationally and make good points, but the option that will do the most damage to the troll is to attempt to discredit them. You can try to point out how their arguments are full of fallacies, but it is almost universally better to just call them a neckbearded basement dweller who has probably never been laid.

This is how we have began to argue. And I am not innocent of this either. I have had my fair share of blunders, insulting and degrading another person instead of focussing on their arguments. I have hid from opinions that I don’t like because I thought the person making it was stupid.

However, upon revisiting their ideas — ignoring the person making them — I was able to decide exactly why I didn’t like them. I was able to think about them critically and make a decision based entirely on that.

Ad hominem attacks are bad for our growth as people. They don’t allow us to consider how we may be wrong, or to view how other people may think. A diverse experience is important in shaping the way we think, and hiding from that diversity doesn’t help us confront any real issues.

We are far too willing to hide from the opinions of others, claiming the opinion is invalid, because the person who said it is not credible, rather than taking the opinion into consideration and confronting it.

Take, for example, the “Fire Kelley,” banner at the last UND men’s hockey home game of the season. While I’m sure there was a point that the students in question were trying to make — whether that be about the Springfest cancellation, the UND nickname, or any other reason — it was overshadowed by the attack on a man who is only part of a system. Instead of criticizing the ideas that these students disagreed with, which would be completely valid, the students directed their passions at a man who is just trying to do his job.

This is the danger we face in a world where we take our batting practice on people, and ignore their ideas. Yes, some people can be criticized, whether it be seriously or jokingly, for the things that they say or do, but when that is used as a distraction to avoid arguing about the real issues, nothing ever gets anywhere.

If we really want change, then we have to be willing to accept that the people we are arguing against are not evil.

As long as we try to fight and stifle opinions that are contradictory to our own through the use of ad hominem attacks that focus more on discrediting the opposition more than they do on discussing the ideas at hand, than we will never get anywhere.

Alex Bertsch is the opinion editor of The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].