Subject: Re: Understanding Erik Naggum From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 10 Oct 2002 17:47:12 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3243260832577317@naggum.no> * Adam Warner | In an amazing display of continued restraint Pascal never stooped to your | level of abuse Erik. Now that you have had time to calm down a bit, I want you to consider your own behavior for a moment. You were replying to an article that had a lengthy and sound argument, yet you /only/ emoted in response. This is fundamentally indecent of you and tells your intelligent readers that you lack self-control. You may wish to /think/ before you react in this way in public. In response to arguments, one expects counter-arguments. Let us see how your counter-arguments even come close to the arguments to which you have responded. | Pascal Costanza has already contributed exceptionally to the Lisp | community through his great "Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp" available | at http://www.cs.uni-bonn.de/~costanza/lisp/guide.html This is a non sequitur. One can certainly be ungrateful for things that others do while doing something else for others. My argument is that Pascal Costanza demands that those who help others put up with all kinds of shit from those who have been helped voluntarily and he argues that those who help them should use more effective communication techniques, and should behave like educators and psychotherapists, professions he use to defend his idiotic policy of dealing with ungrateful miscreants. In so doing, he has placed the entire burden of how advice is received on the shoulders of those who voluntarily and without compensation help another human being in good faith. Instead of gratitude for this aid to the undeserving, Pascal Costanza demands that they take responsibility for how the recipient of their advice "feels". He wants people to use a "warm" language that caters to the readers' emotoins and lists several technical books that those who favor an emotion-free, neutral language that is also devoid of condescension and patronization, would describe as /not/ particular "warm" books, but rather technical and to-the-point. It is thus hard to imagine any measurement of what "warm" means, but Pascal Costanza has also eschewed measurement entirely, and discards the notion so prevalent in science that some method of quantification of results is a good thing in order to know whether you have indeed done better when you feel you have. More often than not, people feel well about their own sense of control, not about the results, so even if people feel better, that does not mean they actually /do/ better. Devoid of measurements and objective standards, Pascal Costanza becomes the arbiter of how people "feel" about the communication. Living up to his demands for a "warmer" languages therefore means contacting him to see how he "feels" about it. I would rather go find water with a divining rod than succumb to this mystical, anti-rational, feel-good policy of communication. Your entire argument is that he is a nice person who helps others and should not be subjected to fair criticism of his actual arguments and his actual position. | It is an extremely helpful guide that also contains many links to | worthwhile material, some that I was surprised to discover for the first | time. Following up on the previous non-sequitur, you now think you can improve your idiotic non-argument by backing it up with more on how you feel. | Pascal Costanza is "the most ungrateful shithead this newsgroup has ever | seen" because he doesn't worship you. Now, this is where your rationality, if any, has left you. It is clear from this moronic non-argument that you experience too much emotion for your own good. Your lack of self-control has moved you into a position where you spew hatred and invent things you think will hurt other people. This is a supposed counter-argument to behavior you could not condone by your silence. I'll say. Wow, man. You really know how to argue against bad behavior that you cannot condone by your silence. Where /does/ a moron like yourself find reason to believe in "worship"? Did you "worship" me when I offered you advice? Did you feel that one person you "worshipped" should have been nicer to another person you "worship"? Is that it? How /did/ you come upon this "worship" idiocy if you do not feel this kind of thing yourself? Do you think it is /bad/ to worship other people? Do you think it is the /recipient/ of your worship that should be branded as a bad guy because of your worship? How on earth could you even come up with this fantastically moronic shit when your goal was to speak up against someone else's bad behavior? Are you as insane as you appear to me right now? Are you really fucking nuts the way you appear to me? Now, why should I even for a moment consider the criticism about my behavior from some lunatic who invents "worship" as an argument in his favor? Just how dumb do you think I am that would look at your pathetic excuse for an emotional outburst and think "oh, my, Adam Nut sure has a great argument!"? People who behave the way you do when you think you are arguing against bad behavior really show the entire world how /appropriate/ it is with emotional outbursts when you get really pissed off by something. But the staggeringly unintelligent, such as Adam "the Nut" Warner, do not manage to produce /arguments/ when they feel many things at the same time. Perhaps your favorite melody of the entire previous millennium was "Words don't come easy to me" by F. R. David? | You are unable to maintain neutral language around him because he is the | newest threat to your perceived status as dominant male. This is /so/ fascinating. We gain a unique insight into a person's value system when he gets angry. I, for instance, consider stupidity and too low intelligence for the task at hand to be one of the most dangerous threat that can befall the human race. Consider momentarily the prospect of the most powerful man in the world, wielding a larger armory than any person before him in the history of the planet, and he is just as dumb as the high-school dropout who got a job at McDonald's only because of his father: He is a much greater threat to the civilized world than the super- terrorist, as he will most certainly continue the legacy of destroying the nation in order to save it. Adam the Emotional Nut, however, appears to believe that nothing is worse in this world than the idiotic behavior of sports fans and primitive people. However, in his emotional zeal, he also forgot everything I have said about dangers of the same thing, that I consider people whose high testosterone levels are only made up for their lack of intelligence to be the most interesting living archeological specimens from the stone age, that the group mentality is the most base and most useless properties of the human psychology after all our basic needs were covered. Your life, livelihood, or even food supply is not at stake when you have the luxury of going on the Internet to engage in an intellectual meeting of minds. To bring homo-erectus-style psychology into this forum the way that Adam the Emotional Nut does here is so out of place that we have to remind ourselves that he actually tries to argue against a position that the person who helps another on Usenet should be held responsible for the emotional development of the person helped. There is one way to look at this from the point of view of an actual case and argument: Adam the Emotional Nut /demonstrates/ what happens when the person who helped him with technical matters does not hold the poor fool's hand when he continues to read articles by the person who helped him. Scratch up one point for Pascal Costanza here! A beneficiary of voluntary assistance on the Internet, Adam the Emotional Nut depends on others for his emotional well-being, and the hero he worshiped because he helped with his technical problems fails to live up to his standards as hero, and the hero-worshiping idiot who looks upon the dominant male must lash out at his idol for not being nice enough. Lacking the intellectual capacity to deal with his emotions, we see that a combination of worship and the dominant male theory of group dynamics produces a person who feels so ill at ease that he has to tell the group that he shall no longer worship the dominant male because he did not make him feel good enough. | While you have the goal of "Immortality in our lifetime" the only thing | you are achieving is infamy. Another /excellent/ argument against my position. The moron now wields a stupid /threat/ instead of using whatever little intellectual capacity he has to argue against a position we are increasingly suspicious that he did not understand at all. But what does understanding matter when you can talk about worshiping and dominant males and make stupid threats like this? Hah! Intellect be damned! Adam the Emotional Nut shows us the way out of our predicament. This is a forum where suck-ups worship the dominant male and where little piss-ants like Adam the Emotional Nut get to vote on who is the dominant male. Let's roll back history about 50,000 years to the time when the emotional equivalent of Adam the Emotional Nut roamed the lands, no strike that, huddled together in little bands of feverishly insecure proto-humans long before their brains grew big enough to become a burden with its excess capacity, and let us look at one small member of the band lash out at the dominant male and for the brief remainder of his miserable life gets to threaten the man with the club. Then fast-forward 50,000 years to see Adam the Emotional Nut sitting behind his computer and feeling oh so smug, because all the way from New Zealand, he can challenge the dominant male that he once worshiped and claim that all he his achieving is infamy. Pity Adam the Emotional Nut. | Though I have no desire to pollute this newsgroup with further arguments As previously remarked, this is the typical behavor of the typical loser who has done something clearly wrong. His lack of intellectual capacity to deal with an argument when he feels something at the same time has made him do some of the smartest things he could be suspected of doing when he felt mad, but it still is a far cry short of imbecilic. The abnormal failure to argue coherently is briefly overshadowed by all the moronic emotions he cares to share with his fellow travelers, but lest we think that he is the moron he makes a serious effort to appear to be, has has no desire to pollute this newsgroup with /further/ -- and let us just pause here for effect because the next word is really big -- /arguments/. Adam the Emotional Nut appears to think he has provided us with arguments -- is that fascinating or what? We clearly look at a person who does not even know the difference "having an argument" and "giving an argument". To Adam the Emotional Nut, there is no distinction. The ability to argue coherently for anything is quickly replaced by his inability to think. At least, we have to commend this fantastic moron with the introspection that goes into realizing that he has polluted this forum. My goodness, is he not a real charmer who both realizes that he pollutes the forum and promises not to do it any more? We just /have/ to see a rationalization of his massive lack of thinking ability coming up soon.! | (and will refrain from responding even if soon provoked) Wow! Amazing! He promises to curtail his pathetic emotional response pattern even if he is soon provoked! That sure is ground for applause. How could anyone think this unthinking, dominant-male-worshiping brute of a screwd-up polluting asshole is a shithead now that he dons his halo and gives us all his most angelic little smile because he will do us all a huge favor and refrain from acting out his inability to argue against anything other than how he feels. | I could not continue to condone your behaviour by my silence. This, however, is the real gem in this godforsaken moron's reaction. I am just in awe of the ability of some people to both act like world-class assholes themselves when they seek to exact retribution against others for some behavior they could not condone and to justify their evil acts. There is something like the confession of a serial killer in this kind of behavior. He has to both promise that he will not do it again /and/ make everybody else responsible for his actions. For what does it mean when Adam the Emotional Nut is the only person in a huge crowd to speak up because he could not condone some behavior with his silence? I mean, everybody else have kept quiet, and although I am fairly sure that we will hear from the other emotional nuts pretty soon, that means that Adam the Emotional Nut is the only one /not/ to condone the behavior with their silence. By virtue of this truly unintelligent statement, Adam the Emotional Nut has not only tried to justify his own evil behavior, he makes everybody else responsible /and/ himself the smallest minority there is! Look around you, Adam! Everybody else condones my behavior with their silence. You /lose/, you insufferable dimwit. Instead of being the one who speaks up, you phrased your position so poorly that everybody else turned against you in your very own words! But does anyone condone anything with their silence? Of course not! My goodness, what kind of endless chatter would we have on Usenet if people were forced to speak up lest they be presumed to condone everything that the did /not/ comment on! We would have several messages every single day from every one of tens of thousands of people who could not condone the behavior of others by their silence. Everything from misinformation to using words from a taboo word list to not being Christian enough and not being kind enough to the mentally handicapped, there would be no end in sight of the endless number of abusive and hateful messages that would flow from the hands of those who could not condone the behavior or others by their silence, and then everybody who thought that Adam the Emotional Nut went overboard need to express their hatred for that fucked-up moron, too. It would never end. The fact is that by his most reprehensible act of /cowardice/, Adam the Emotional Nut has not only derailed the argument, letting the most ungrateful bastard this newsgroup has seen in a long time go scot free by virtue of the inability to continue discussions in the presence of such a goddamn asshole as Adam the Emotional Nut, he has put everybody in the awkward position of having to voice their concern lest he think they all condone the "behavior" that could not. But perhaps it is possible for Adam the Emotional Nut to understand that he has hurt himself really badly this time. Perhaps this insufferable dimwit can grasp that his lack of ability to express himself intelligently caused him to become the lone nut in the minority of people who does not condone what everybody else condones. Adam, you should realize that you are not the dominant male here, either. (In fact, the very concept is an insult to your intelligence, and nobody is any such stupid thing.) You should realize that you were the only one to speak up and everybody else implicitly approve of the behavior you do not approve of and you should take this to heart. People are not as dumb as you are, they are not as brutally unintelligent as you are, and they do not think it is a good idea to derail discussions because you /feel/ more than your pathetic excuse for a brain can deal with. Adam, the fact remains that you chose to attack me most viciously. That is what I shall remember you for, and you will not be let off the hook. You had time to think before you posted your idiotic article, so no apologies will be accepted. Your action was premeditated, and even though you would most likely be able to defend yourself with temporary insanity and lack of full control of your faculties at the time you spewed your hateful message, I am not going to accept that, either. You are the kind of person this forum needs much fewer of. And if you thought you were arguing /against/ my point that this stupid positive reinforcement first bullshit is condescending and patronizing, you have shown the entire world what /you/ choose when you need to make a comment on somebody's behavior. It most certainly was /not/ positive reinforcement. So not only did you make a fool of yourself, you made a fool of Pascal Costanza, too, with your moronic emotional behavior. Die in shame, Adam Warner. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.