Subject: Re: Negation
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 05:51:16 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3225246687854077@naggum.net>

* tb+usenet@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
| I'm offended by being called an idiot, and the direct personal insults
| that Erik likes to lob around.  You know, the offensive stuff.

  I repeat myself, but please quit lying about me and what I say and do.
  It is becoming increasingly clear to everyone here that you favor your
  own personal attacks at me so highly that any consistency in your ethics
  is no longer possible:  What you do is right and what I do is wrong.  Yet
  what you do is clearly wrong no matter how much moral righteousness you
  can muster.  Governor George W. Bush was of the moral caliber that reacts
  like "What!?  He _murdered_ someone?  Let's kill him!" and then he became
  President and went "They harbored terrorists who were so angry at the
  U.S. policies over many years that they _murdered_ 2500 of our people!!?
  What horrible terror!  Let's make it U.S. policy to murder 100,000 of
  their people, and maybe they will stop wanting to retaliate!"  I am quite
  sad that such a _moron_ can become president of a country I once looked
  up to, but with the approval rating that _idiot_ receives, I wonder what
  is wrong with the entire culture and the American population.  It also
  explains why being an utter idiot in public is somehow more acceptable
  among Americans, who now muster the most retarded moral justification for
  their out-of-control anger and misdirected desire for revenge of the
  people who _dare_ harm them because they act like idiots.  Idiots on
  USENET have become worse after the supreme idiot became president.

  FYI: I do not _like_ to make people aware of their idiotic behavior.  It
  is necessary, because otherwise they get away with it (which they have
  always done before, hence their current idiotic behavior) and behave even
  worse.  For most people, this works remarkably well -- they stop short of
  being idiots long before anyone has to drag out large caliber "insults",
  and they actually grasp what criticism of their behavior means and
  entails.  Only the idiots get called idiots, and they go on to prove it
  with a vigor that, IF IT WERE REDIRECTED TO THINK CLEARLY, would earn
  them a Nobel Prize in something.

  So, Thomas Bushnell, just stop behaving like a stupid child who has never
  experienced rejection of your beliefs -- it is not somebody else's fault
  that you believe something that they do not accept.  Scheme is no good
  outside of comp.lang.scheme.  Deal with it.  If you do not, and repeat
  more childish and stupid lies about other people, you must be corrected
  each and every time.  Acknowledge that you are exceptionally bad at
  understanding what people say when they do not agree with you completely
  from the outset, but we already have at least one example of a retard who
  "completely agrees" with something, yet has no concept of what it means
  to make use of his agreement.  People like that have _serious_ mental
  capacity problems, and the common phrase for this is precisely "idiot".
  However, it is not something you _are_ for the rest of your life.  JUST
  ACT SMARTER AND DISPROVE THE CHARGE and you can even succeed in putting
  it to shame.  The more you keep confirming it with idiotic
  counter-attacks, the more right I am about you.  Non-idiots do not act
  that way.  It is that simple.  Now, START TO THINK, DAMNIT!

  Stop doing things that need to be corrected and criticized and you will
  not be corrected and criticized.  if you turn to _attack_ those who
  correct and criticize you, you _are_ an idiot.  Listen, learn, use your
  brain.  Above all, do not lose sight of the purpose you have when you
  take part in a newsgroup community: It is _not_ to fight against those
  who criticize you.

  I fight you morons out of necessity, because idiots are more destructive
  than anything else: They make it harder for people to share their
  insight: having to respond to idiots who do not understand anything but
  think they know more than others, is taxing on people, even if they do
  not actually respond to them.  Even the presence of one idiot in a group
  of smart people can cause the whole group to deterioate.  Nothing mankind
  has done is worse than tolerance of idiocy, and that is basically what
  "manners" are for, since intelligent people figure out what they want
  from what they do and do not fight merely _against_ something they do not
  like.  I think Thomas Bushnell precisely _keeps_ fighting me because he
  fights _against_ me and he has yet to figure out what my signature means.

  On the other hand, I assume that you actually like to keep doing what you
  do.  It betrays a strange lack of ethics that depends on respecting
  people before you can respect them, and if you suddenly do not, well, you
  have no ethics at all.  It also confirms something I believe very
  strongly -- that some people are in need of a credible counter-force or
  counter-threat in order to behave.  If they think that their enemy cannot
  hurt them, they use _unlimited_ force.  Thomas Bushnell is the kind of
  person who apparently thinks that he is not hurt by what he does, and
  that my responses to his articles do not hurt him, either.  If this does
  not confirm my label "idiot" as applied to him, nothing will.  But let's
  get another round of self-incrimination from him on his journey to
  enlightenment.

///
-- 
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.