Subject: Re: less parentheses --> fewer parentheses From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 2000/08/25 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3176202364736569@naggum.net> * danfm@dartmouth.edu (FM) | It's your utter inability to understand the dual use of the word Really? And what is your grounds for concluding that? The whole point in my discussion is to stress lack of absolutes and lack of unique meanings. Your head doesn't really work, does it? If you understand both uses, how come you have to fight against one of them? That's what this idiocy of your boils down to. | You can't grasp that the word "not" is often used for | things other than logical negation in English. Really? And how did you arrive at that conclusion when the issue is whether you would understand the logical usage? You amaze me. I thought intelligence at your level was accompanied by fur, grunts, and bananas, but clearly it has developed language skills at quite an advanced level. | For some reason, you are content to use the word "human" for | contrasting purposes, yet you bark just as one uses a fairly | standard definition of the word "not," which happens to conflict | with your notion of negation. Really? Who's the one barking about "not", here? I'm perfectly happy with multiple meanings, but I clearly don't use _all_ of them at the same time. When you fight tooth and nail against the one that is clearly implied, it's somewhat curious to watch you try to blame me for it. But hey, Barry Margolin is on the loose, so I guess it's infectious to blame me for things I don't do. Watch out, though. Hatred is infectious, too. | Funny how one who takes learning as seriously as he claims hasn't | learned to see things relatively and loses sight of things just as | his world of absolutes falls apart with each piece floating in chaos. You just described yourself, but I guess you knew that. I doesn't work very well to play the mirror game on people smarter than you. I was talking about how important it is to learn from any source, regardless of how some infantile reactions like saving face might compel one to reject others, but it is clear that you will never learn from a source that is not _very_ agreeable to you. Instead you will defend that _you_ be right, rather than defend _what_ is right and adapt your own views accordingly. You're a people person, and it shows all too well. People persons are seldom right, but they are very agreeable as long as others are agreeable to them. As soon as someone tries to tell them something they don't know, it's more important whether their image in the minds of others will change than whether it's correct or useful, and if the image is under threat, god help whoever told them the bad news. Thank you for letting me know that you're the kind of person who doesn't give a flying fuck about what's true, correct, or useful as long as the one telling you about it offends you in ways completely irrelevant to the information you receive. One-dimensional people are so amazingly useless. #:Erik -- If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.