You are correct, Steve... and you know why that is, don't you?
As an argument increases in length, people with less solid and/or poorly formed arguments begin to lose the argument. Knowing that they have lost, they choose to stray off topic; it is an argumentative/debate tactic known as diversion. The key is to not let your opponent change topic away from the one at hand, the one he has implicitly conceded defeat to by using the diversionary tactic. Thus, the more intelligent and well-formed ideas are able to carry longer throughout a thread, while the half-wits are lost early. This is also why the "How often do you masturbate" thread is still going; there is no deep thought to it, and why other in depth threads die somewhat soon. Not to imply anyone here in particular is of less intelligence, it is merely a fact of statistics that given a sample population, there will be a variance in degrees of intelligence. It is all very simple, really.
ps- Man the weather is crazy here today. It was rainy, sunny, hailed for a while, sunny, monsoon, now it is clear (although dark)...
Wren (diverts)