Subject: Re: On nil qua false [was: Re: On conditionals] From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 05:06:10 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3215999167870810@naggum.net> * Bruce Hoult | Every time I or Andreas or someone else is interested in learning about | and comparing the way CL does something with the way that other | langauges do similar things, you for some reason I don't fathom | immediately think that they want to *change* CL. NO, you imbecile. It is that you want to make people feel their teeth with their tongue. Normal people walk through their entire life not feeling their teeth with their tongue. But, if something goes wrong, they keep feeling them all the time, and then they pay someone to fix it. What you are doing is to tell people that their teeth are wrong, when in fact they are not. You run around like a headless chicken in this community and tell people that should feel their teeth because they have flaws that only you were smart enough to notice. And so many people feel their teeth with their tongues, and make funny faces. Then they have to explain to others why they are feeling their teeth with their tongue, and so lots of people get insecure about their teeth who were perfectly happy with them up until then. This would raise "awareness" of something that really needs to be the subject of no awareness whatsoever, because it uses resources and concentration that should have had productive use. This would actually be a great thing to do for a _really_ devious dentist. But then you are so incredibly, insufferably annoying to tell people that "no, no, no, I do not want you to _change_ your teeth, there is nothing to fix, really, but just keep feeling your teeth, because I think it is so amusing to watch all you people make funny faces". Then you do not grasp the first thing about people's reaction to your idiotic behavior. | Astounded. Really? Your ability to reason about what you do seems thinner than the homeopathic soup made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon starved to death. Dylan freaks seem so obsessed with their language they would kill their own mothers just so they could use the skin to make a drum to beat their own praises. That _widely_ used language seems utterly unspoilt by failure, and if its proponents should occasionally have stumbled across the truth, they have hastily picked themselves up and hurried on as if nothing had happened. /// -- The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.