Subject: Re: Negation From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:50:57 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3225250268353962@naggum.net> * Thomas Bushnell, BSG | If Erik wants to be offended by me, that's fine, and it doesn't offend me. I keep saying that you need to be corrected and criticized when you keep posting lies about other people. I keep arguing that your "disagreement" argument is completely misguided -- it is about posting known falsehoods, but this does not register with you, does it? You want to be free to post lies and falsehoods and disinformation. Sorry, no can do. The purpose of posting to a public forum is such that those who know better than you do can correct you, and then you learn from them. It is quite fantastically hostile to the core purpose of any exchange of information to repeat known falsehoods. It wastes _everybody's_ time and is the most supreme act of disrespect and and disregard for other people's values. Only trolls think public fora exist for them to post known falsehoods for the enjoyment of seeing reasonable, caring people react to them. I do not know about your enjoyment, yet, but when you manage to invent that I "like" calling you an idiot, it must come from somewhere. I presume it is your own emotional state, that it gives you some sense of perverse satisfaction to lie and misrpresent and denigrate me, Thomas Bushnell. However, I think you are the "look what you made me do!" kine of person. I do not consider it possible to offend me personally, but I think people who _intend_ to offend others are morons, because to be "offended" by what somebody else says appears to me to be _immensely_ useless, and gives them far more credibility than they deserve. Therefore, I think they confuse harsh treatment with offense and hostility. Now, knowing what these people usually claim to have known beforehand (as if anyone should be swayed by someone's prejudice, a serious mental illness that is not treated medically, but should), what on earth prompted them to pick a fight with me to begin with? What could possibly have caused a person to be offended by the response to an idiotic act of aggression towards someone who is "known" to respond harshly to idiotic behavior? There is one possible conclusion: They really are staggeringly resounding evidence of their own idiocy. Are there other conclusions? It is the contents of what people say that I respond to, not their manner (how could I?). However, false accusations, disinformation, intellectual dishonesty of many kinds, all reduce the value of the forum in which they are presented. I simply want people who do not value the forum and the community in which they live to go away. Whether they spend their time denouncing the community effort and the basis of its existence or they invade us from another community with a serious lack of self-esteem, so they have to denounce what other people value in order to feel good about their own, probably wrong, choices, they are equally unwelcome. I want to welcome people who come to a community and wonder "what is it that you value? what do you agree on?" and I want the "your values are all wrong, your decisions are bad" crowd to go away and/or die. People have come together because they believe in a few things and not in others. Make these things explicit to those who want to know, argue their case to make things clear, and those who disagree _after_ they understand are free to offer suggestions in the spirit of what they understand. Those who offer suggestions in their own spirit, only, and who disagree _before_ they understand are anathema to any serious community or forum. I find it strange to watch a person conclude that he must disrespect another for his own fabrications of what that other person has done and said. I find it even stranger to see someone gain magical insight into another person's intentions and desires and use that as the basis for his attacks. Yet, the strangest thing of all happens to people who I think are seriously lacking in intelligence: Their brain seems to latch into a curious state where the principle is "I think about this, therefore it exists" as opposed to a non-psychotic, rational mode of thinking that goes "this exists, therefore I think about it". In the literature, this is usually considered a "psychotic break", or simply "going nuts'. It is a curious thing to watch happen to people, indeed. | What offends me is not his offense, but the manner in which he expresses | it. You are the _only_ person responsible for what offends you. Stop being offended. If you use your emotional response as the reason to want to control other people and the reason for your attacks (note that they are no longer counter-attacks -- you lie about me without provocation), you have a very serious personality disorder that needs urgent attention. But overall, I think this is a "look what you made me do" kind of idiocy. Sot the only possible advice to Thomas Bushnell is: Accept responsibility for your own actions and emotional reactions. What you feel and what you do cannot _possibly_ be anybody else's fault. Feelings of revenge are perfectly OK. Acts of revenge are proof positive of an idiot at work. /// -- 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.