Subject: Re: Macro-writing in CL From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 16:44:51 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3201180287961785@naggum.net> * "Biep @ http://www.biep.org/" <reply-via@my-web-site.com> > If you could, I could give you some hints on reading, like the fact that there > is a semantics phase between input syntax and reply syntax. > I really hope one day you will get to the level that you can read and understand > what I wrote, and see that you are not addressing at all what I am talking > about. I believe in the reciprocality of advice. This means that advice that obviously only work one way ("you should" and "I should" are dissimilar) are completely devoid of meaning and are instead pure acts of aggression. You have shown me that you do not listen to what anybody else writes at all. This means that "read and understand what I wrote" means only one thing: "agree with me". This is probably also why you also believe that disagreement has anything to do with the criticism you receive. Now, please tell me, in simple words that you think I can understand, what are you posting here in order to achieve? What is your goal? When would you be satisfied to have achieved that goal? Is there a measure of partial success? Of incremental improvement towards any goal? From what I read of your posts, you are here to defend your own _person_. It is not your _ideas_ that you defend, it is _your_ ideas. That is not a very healthy premise to hold when you start posting to USENET. Ideas, both good and bad, get beaten up. If you mix _yourself_ into all this, you get hurt. Any ideas you post on USENET must of necessity be ideas that you can afford to see trashed, and not only ideas, anything you say at all _must_ be worth so little that anybody, anywhere can say whatever they want about it and it would not possibly affect your _person_. This is usually easy, but some people turn out to be so personally involved in what they post that they feel as if they are under personal attack even when only what they have _said_ is under attack, if anything, and then it may turn pretty nasty, especially if they are the religiously motivated kind that want to expel "evil" and can do anything they want to fight it, including _much_ worse things than anybody ever did to them. Something in the human psyche shows up in people whose ethics only work when they are treated _well_ by others: they go insane and become the most unethical people you can think of when they are "mistreated", a judgment call they make entirely on their own. Fairweather ethics is useless. Your _real_ ethics is the one you reveal when you are angry, _really_ angry. I think it is useless to talk about ethics among well-behaved people to begin with -- it is what we do when people are _not_ well-behaved (to us) that matters. The kind of person who goes mad with rage and starts insulting people with ridiculously malplaced accusations that have _nothing_ to do with the topic at hand is but a curious, yet irrelevant, lunatic. For instance, anyone who tells others they cannot read probably have had a deeply personal relationship with reading disorders. It was very bad for them, so it must hurt for others, too. If people share the same problem, say suffering through the ambarrassments of remedial reading in grade school, the feeling is immediate and an amotional response follows automatically. However, if you try this to someone whose reading skills far exceed your own, who read better than most adults at age 4, who reads snd writes several different languages, who very seldom publishes spelling mistakes and who turns to a dictionary to _learn_ new words and to make sure they are understood correctly, it is only laughable evidence of a loser's pathetic attempt to make his opponent as bad as himself. A bad reader who tries in vain to insult others by being worse than him, which would have been a very grave insult indeed, only reveals his own problem. I think this is amusing in the most obvious cases, like this one. But I, too have hot spots. _Very_ few people have figured out which they are, but "your ideas are bad/stupid/whatever" is _not_ among them, but I do think that those who cannot accept such trashing of their ideas in public should lock themselves in their private chambers and swallow the key. It may be that the concepts of "private" and "public" have deteriorated to the point where it no longer makes sense to talk about it at all, but I want to believe that there is still a distinction and that those who confuse the two are and will forever be _wrong_ in doing so. Using a phony identification on your USENET posts is not a good way to separate private and public, especially when you are so sensitive about private matters that you have gone out of your way to make it impossible to attach them to any real person, anyway. #:Erik -- Travel is a meat thing.