Subject: Re: Difference between LISP and C++
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 28 Oct 2002 21:28:54 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3244829334023227@naggum.no>

* Erik Naggum
| Nobody says "your argument is fucked up", you dimwit.  The argument is
| countered calmly and cleanly without undue emotions either way.

* Len Charest <no.email@my.inbox>
| The following is for entertainment purposes only. Do not taunt Happy Fun
| Ball.

  You both support my point very strongly and notify us that you are never
  going to be a valued contributor to this forum.  Congratulations.

  What amazes me with these sub-humans is how much they need to make
  matters worse.  The abject failure to undestand cause and effect should
  be a study in human stupidity at its worst: People who do not like the
  climate in a public forum go out of their way to call attention to their
  massive lack of coping mechanisms and want others to improve /their/ life
  and they do so by harrassing people and digging up the past.  These are
  clearly people who /have no future/, or they would have done something to
  make their future better.  This is important to know about people.

  Some people live in the past tense, while others live in the future tense.
  This is important to understand when watching how they react to events in
  their own lives.  The past tense people have no concept of improvement,
  because /they are what they did/.  The future tense people have difficulty
  understanding such people because /they are what they want to do/.

  Some people have a motto that goes somewhat like "live every moment so
  you can live with it for the rest of your life", causing a life of pain,
  regret, and torture for their failures, because mistakes are inevitable.
  Errare humanum est.  What matters to an intelligent person who has
  realized that they have a choice at every single moment of their lives is
  that /they can be in control of their lives/ instead of living under the
  tortured fear that others will "remember" something that those others
  thought was bad.  At every single moment, a person who has not /thought/
  about anything may wake up from his comatose state and actually /think/
  for the first time in their life.  There is no way to tell when this will
  happen to an individual.  All this talk about "free will" boils down to
  one particular choice: to think or not to think.

  What I do is I expect people who have never /thought/ about anything at
  all to /start thinking/, and this actually works very, very often, but
  the curious thing about people who think is that they tend to do so in
  private.  Thinking is not a public event.  People like Len Charest and
  other with similar lacks can do what they do in public only because what
  they do is precisely possible /only/ in public.  It would not work to
  behave in private the way such people behave in public.  Imagine that
  someone sent the crap I respond to by private mail to someone.  What
  would they do?  It is not even worth reading, much less responding to it.
  Some people are clearly evil and destructive and the only thing they can
  share with other people is /their own lack of future/.  Len Charest is
  the kind of person who is not even sufficiently /aware/ of what he is
  doing to realize that people will remember him for what he has done today
  and previously on this newsgroup.  No wonder he hides behind an anonymous
  address, like so many other future-less sub-humans.  Most likely, his
  real name is not even "Len Charest", and if it were, he has /deniability/
  because of his fake address.  This is the way of the people of past tense.

  But even people like "Len Charest" have the choice to /think/, and they
  can make that choice at absolutely any unpredictable time.  Therefore,
  the right way to deal even with such lowlives is to /expect them to think/ 
  and to /forget their non-thinking past/ when they make that choice.
  Nothing can be more profound than this, that people have the opportunity
  to change their mind.  Respect for other people begins and ends with this
  tenet, that only when other people can decide to think without notifying
  you or anyone else, can you approach them with an expectation that they
  /could/ have woken up and realized something important since last time
  you talked to them and you /cannot know when someone will think/, or what
  they will think about.  Treating people, like the non-thinking mob treats
  people here, as if they were unreachable and you "know" them is the most
  indecent and gravest insult you can ever offer anyone, but these people
  do not understand this, because /they do not think/ and therefore do not
  understand what kind of insult it is to act on the assumption that others
  do not think, either.

  The most important problem with being focused on the past is that it
  limits your perception of your freedom of choice, and people who start to
  think but discover that they were /really fantastically stupid/ in the
  past tend to shut down just as soon as they have started to think because
  it is so goddamn hurtful to realize what kind of an asshole you have been.
  Therefore, the likelihood that "Len Charest" will ever think diminishes
  with every single one of his non-thinking outbursts and he will be held
  accountable, according to his own standards, for what he has done, and
  not for what he wants to do.  Therefore, I have pity for people who have
  closed the door on their own future with such force as "Len Charest" has.

-- 
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.