I leave for eight hours and this thing jumps to four pages. That’ll teach me to work on a Sunday.
Starving Artist, I’m sure your respect for Liberal is well meant but you really are allowing it to gloss over some faults.
Liberal’s intelligence is really not in question. Dude’s got a lot goin on upstairs. Saying he’s smarter than other dopers is a disservice to the others that have paid their money though. Saying that that, and the age gap, are the reasons why some posters have problems understanding Liberal is wrong.
It took me a lil bit o’focus before I could finally decipher Liberal-speak and realize that sometimes he isn’t trying to be an asshole. We basically had to be arguing on the same side for me to catch on. Once you have a similar idea in mind, figuring the language isn’t really that hard. With Liberal’s devil’s advocite practise (which really makes me think of the Simpsons and pinball, but I digest) that’s a chance that very few people get. And even with the knowledge, I still wonder why the hell he says half of the things he says.
Liberal can also be too quick on the trigger. Understandable given his position in most dogpiles (the bottom), but something that needs to be relaxed.
I’d also suggest that Liberal’s intelligence has lead to a hardening of the view, a rare condition on this board. It would come in handy when being assaulted on all sides, but makes it pretty tough to let in different sides enough for them to be understandable. It can also lead to treating people like they don’t know jack shit, even when they do.
I’ve actually met Jack. Nice guy, but smells a bit
Valid points are missed. Conversations become arguments. Threads become derailed. I make posts that are too large and wind up missing dinner.
Basically SA, Liberal has decided to try to learn something during a pitting which would be nice if it caught on. The defense is nice and appreciated by Liberal, but cut it back a bit.
A lot of people, myself included, get itchy, painful rashes from something secreted by the skin of mangos. This might apply to baboons as well, so caution is advised.
He looked back at the same situation everyone else saw, with a stunningly insightful appreciation of the depths of human despair. He spoke out for a voiceless human in misery. And everyone decided that was an insult. And they decided it was the wrong insult, at that.
For everyone else, there was a person, enduring a very unhappy circumstance, and not able to deal with it. For Lib, there were two people, divided by a gulf of experience beyond the perception of the OP, and evidently the entire audience of the thread.
I understood it on the first read. I also realized that no one was going to listen to the substance, but rather would contend with the style. He was delivering a horrifying testimony on the world beyond the brink, and it pains me to understand how well he knows that world. I was not surprised when that aspect of the original comment was immediately lost.
Nor am I surprised that some people still feel anger over what they misunderstood as an attack on the poster. It was a dismissal of the entire reality of the poster; spoken as the if he was the subject of the poster’s complaint. He took the least empathetic person, and loaned him a voice.
I don’t see that as an attack, and if it is an insult, it is an insult to more than just the person of the OP.
Tris
“The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.” ~ Alexander Jablokov ~
Stunningly insightful? How about stunningly over-the-top and assholish? Tris, you are behaving as obtusely as Lib is being accused of. There were a million ways of pointing out that in his opinion the OP was being callous. Lib, as he does so often, chose the most aggressive, offensive way possible.
Lib does not have the corner on suffering. I could give a rat’s ass about what he has or hasn’t experienced during his trail of tears. If he had personal experience with the emotional state he was ascribing to the stinky client of MissTake’s, then IMO he should have talked about it and exhibited some “ethos”, as Aristotle meant it. And I might have started to change my mind about him, even.
See? I can reference a philosopher too! Stunningly insightful, wouldn’t you say? Sure you would. [insert roll-eyes emoticon here]
You see, this is a very telling comment. There was nothing in the thread that was so profound it couldn’t be grasped. Liberal was attempting to say that the poor guy was undoubtedly so beaten down due to the bad things in his life that offending the OP was likely to be the last thing on his mind. You and MissTake --possibly because of previous problems with Liberal, I don’t know – interpreted it as though he were insulting you.
I have no idea. I’d never heard either of them prior to reading them in that thread. But their meaning was obvious to me, and, in my borderline muddle-headed way, it occurred to me that perhaps I was able recognize their meaning more easily because of my relatively (ahem) advanced age and experience, which I felt possibly allowed me to empathize more acutely with the OP’s client and therefore be able to recognize Lib’s meaning, whereas such meaning seemed to be lost on other posters to the thread.
Please! You are both putting words in my mouth and taking offense where none was intended. I never said he was using “grown up” language. And I never meant to imply by comparison that you weren’t “grown up.” But the fact of the matter is that a 50-year-old person has much more life experience and a different perspective on things than someone who is twenty or thirty. This is not in any way a put down of twenty or thirty-year-olds. It’s life’s natural progression. I’m sure seventy-year-olds have a different perspective on life than I do, and I’m sure you have a different perspective on life than a seventeen-year-old would have.
All I meant by my age comment was that perhaps Lib’s station on life’s path has caused him to have a different perspective on things than many of the posters here at the Dope – given that it is strongly populated with people in their twenties and thirties – and that this different perspective may be part of the reason why so many people seem to have trouble taking him the way he intends to be taken…whereas I, coming from a perspective that is much more similar to his, seem to have far less trouble knowing what it is he is trying to say.
Not necessarily. Do you realize what you’re saying? You are in effect saying that he should be a mind-reader. Lib was using figures of speech. How on Earth is he to have any idea whether or not the wide variety of people that will read them will already be familiar with them? When using figures of speech, you just use them and assume people either will know what they mean or they won’t. What you don’t usually expect is that if someone doesn’t happen to know it they will assume, ipso facto, that it’s an insult aimed at them. This is where the breakdown occurs in the grasping you spoke of. It’s not that Lib used too obscure a figure of speech, it’s that you and MissTake and some of the others here were far too ready to take offense when you didn’t get the point he was trying to make.
I don’t think anyone is at fault! This, to me, is the whole problem with the hard feelings in MissTake’s thread in a nutshell. Something went wrong, so somebody has to be at fault. It was simply a misunderstanding!Lib said something that he meant one way and it was taken in another way. End of story! Everything else is either a result of previous unhappy run-ins with Lib, or it seems to come from feelings of inferiority such as your question just above implies. You aren’t dumb! You didn’t fail! There was no test to be purposely made hard! In fact, there was no test at all! There was only an observation that was misunderstood. No biggie!
Apart from the fact that I don’t believe I’ve ever referred to Liberal as a “massive fount of wisdom and elucidation,” I’ve taken a fair amount of time here to try to explain myself in such a way that it does wash with you because I can tell you are a good person and I want you to know I meant no offense by anything I said to you. I never meant to imply anything negative about you at all. I hope I’ve at least cleared that up.
You are correct. All of us have areas where we can improve. I just felt that there was too much genuinely cruel and undeserved criticism of Lib going on and I just wanted to try to counteract some of it in at least somewhat of a constructive way.
Well, maybe. Possibly. Sometimes, sure. I’m not convinced, though, that it is to a degree more or less than anyone else. Ongoing, even as you posted, were discussions about people taking offense from me — one because I spelled his username wrong last year, one because I accepted a deductive argument over a narrative one, and another because I used a metaphor with which he was not familiar. And in general, I’m taking very little offense in this thread, but rather trying to grow from the advice and criticism.
Possibly. However, one man’s snarky drive-by is another man’s witty riposte. Sometimes, there is simply a clash of wordviews, and it does not mean that one person is bad while the other is good.
Not fond, exactly. I’ve always acknowledged my own weak expository skills. But I have promised to work on coherence, and I will.
Agreed. And that’s on my list.
I strongly disagree. Every comment made by every person posting is necessarily a conclusion drawn from his worldview.
Take, for example, something someone has already mentioned: a discussion about some shortcoming or problem with a school. There are as many possible approaches to this as there are people approaching. Someone might say that a change in policy is the answer. Someone else might suggest increased funding. (Or decreased funding.) Someone else might suggest that there is no problem at all, that the student is overreacting or looking at things the wrong way. All of these people are expressing what they believe would be a solution based on how they view the world, and specifically the school within that world. Why is it that I should be denied the expression of my own view, just because the solution that I would offer is to eliminate public schools?
Just because you might disagree that private schools would be more responsive than public schools to complaints by their customers does not mean that my opinion constitutes a hijack, recast, or redirect any more than anyone else’s. Is the person who suggests a change in policy redirecting the discussion to a theory of administration? Is the person who suggests an increase or decrease in funding recasting the thread as a discussion of accounting and budgeting? Is the person who says he perceives no problem hijacking the thread into a debate on sociology? I happen to see the world as a place where peaceful honest people ought to be free to pursue their own happiness in their own way. How can I possibly — without dishonesty of intent — post any other way? Sure, I might take an opposing side if I believe it has merit, but I will never believe that seizing the property of Peter for the sake of Paul has any merit whatsoever.
You won’t feel ignored anymore, not when you post to me. Unless I just miss it altogether, as can happen sometimes when I am one against twelve. Just persist and know that it is nothing personal.
Okay. But I’m not Hindu, and I’ve read the Bagavad-Gita. I’m not Muslim, and I’ve read the Qur’an. I’m not a communist, but I’ve read the Manifesto of the Communist Party. And I’m not a Nazi, but I’ve read Mein Kampf. These, along with the Bible, are some of the most important works of literature in the history of the world. For that reason alone, they deserve a read.
Just this: explain more, right off the bat. It is true that lately you often first pop into threads with single sentance snipes instead of longer rebutals. You do stick around to argue with anyone that responds, which is why these aren’t just drivebys. But it does often take several pages of Socratic wheedling on both sides before you come out and explain your generally ambiguous and cryptic single sentances.
I don’t think that’s been a very productive approach to discussion. They DO stir things up, but in a way frought with confusion. Especially since, and this is the biggest problem, it usually nets a few newer posters that aren’t familiar with you at all and have no idea in what spirit your comments are meant. Longer initial explanations would avoid a lot of totally unecessary back and forth, because they give people a much clearer idea of not only what the position is that’s being taken, but in what spirit the criticism or critique is meant. Short quips are too over interpretable.
I think, now re-reading the more well-meaning comments from others in this thread, that this impression is a pretty widely held one.
The only downside I see is that longer initial posts means lots of parsed out replies, which can quickly spin of tons of tangents. At least short punchy posts keep on topic, as with the natural selection/falsifiable thread.
I think I can do that, as long as I don’t have to write a book about it. Instead of “Why not just eliminate public schools?”, I can say, “Why not just eliminate public schools, since private schools might be more likely to heed the demands of parents, who in this case would be their market”. I hope you agree that it shouldn’t be necessary that I quote Von Mises, cite Hayek’s Theory of Spontaneous Order, and cover four hypothetical applications of libertarian political theory and Austrian economics in case people don’t know what I mean by market demand.
The problem is, if you just say “why not eliminate public schools” you are going to run into two major sorts of people.
People like me, who know what you are talking about, and maybe even agree with you on the issue, but for whom “eliminate public schools” might be far too vague. For instance, I personally think that if we simply tried to eliminate public schools right now, the result would be an offputting disaster, because heavily infastructure-depedant things like schools take decades to build and expand to accomodate new students. Some very long term transition program would be needed to make it work without causing massive chaos and facing insurmountable political opposition. You might consider that objection to “obvious” (though I don’t think it is, since there are TONS of hard questions to confront and the solutions to various problems are not obvious to me anyway). Or you might consider it trivial, since you dismiss all those concerns as illegitimate in the face of a clear moral imperative to stop public schooling right this second. But either way, to someone familiar with the issue “why not eliminate public schools, the market would be better” is still a pretty vague position without enough specifics to know where to start. There are litterally hundreds of different advocates who would agree with that first proposition but disagree about all manner of further things, and in a thread that means several more rounds of just getting the basic details of everyone’s take out on the table.
People who have never considered the idea and have no idea what you are talking about. It might be irritating, but they really ARE going to have to be held by the hand through the basics. And this can happen either of two ways: either they can drag out the basics in an adversarial way that sets up ready rancor by the time you are through the basics, or they can get the gist of it all at once and start aruging from there.
I think a good rule of thumb is: if you can forsee that you are probably going to have to explain or outline something later on in the thread anyway, why not just get it out of the way to begin with? Or if there are standard repeated claims, links to the basics might save time.
It would come in handy when being assaulted on all sides, but makes it pretty tough to let in different sides enough for them to be understandable. It can also lead to treating people like they don’t know jack shit, even when they do.