I never said you couldn’t be apologetic. However, saying something so common sense as “there’s always a chance I’ll be misunderstood” sounds like an excuse to not even try to cut down. YMMV.
I can only suppose you mean this part, taken from Post #211 in this thread:
What I find absolutely flabbergasting is that you think this adds any sort of meaningful clarity to your statement. Guinistasia is exactly right when she says your definition of coercion is hopelessly vague.
There’s nothing responsive in this reply, or conducive to genuine discussion. Instead Liberal is devious when he’s in a tight spot.
Oy. Well, just a page back, people are telling me that nothing is too obvious or too common to mention, and that I should expound at greater length. I’m begining to feel like a wishbone. For me, the obvious meaning was that my goal is to do better, but not to be perfect. As you say, your mileage may vary.
It’s still not germane, I know, but . . . huh? If you’re going to sign a name, I’ll use that name. If you don’t want people to call you Daniel, why on earth would you sign your posts with it? I’m sorry, but that seems entirely too bizarre to me.
Let me ask you this: do you believe that your post, quoted here, is “conducive to genuine discussion”? Or responsive to what I wrote?
Perhaps “quirk” means something different to you than it does to me. I freely acknowledge that it’s not rational, which is why I told him to take it or leave it. If he decides to keep calling me Daniel, that’s my problem.
Daniel
What is wrong with you guys? :mad:
He did not call her a gnat on a camel’s ass!!!
Damn, this is getting tiresome. He said that from the perspecive of the smelly, downtrodden client, she and her offended sensibilities were no more important than would be a gnat on a camel’s ass.
What in the hell is so hard to understand about this?
If he had said, “You heartless bitch, you’re no more than a gnat on a camel’s ass.” – or something similar – that would be calling her a gnat on a camel’s ass.
And you guys accuse Lib of twisting words and meanings. He’s got nothing on you. :rolleyes:
Sorry, “bolding mine” should have gone in my part of the post.
Well, if you miss the biblical reference, you’re left floundering for an explanation of why Liberal would use such an odd phrasing. Here in the pit at least, malice is frequently a good guess.
To be honest, I find the definition rather compelling. Coercion to me is inducing someone to take an action that they would not take, if they had full information and freedom of choice. As such, defining coercion as initial force or deception seems eminently reasonable. What you call “hopelessly vague” I would call inclusive - there are a great range of coercive behaviours. I don’t really have a problem with this; it would seem difficult to found an entire philosophy on a narrow definition. So “coercion” becomes a matter of interpretation. So? So is “social utility” in a statist context. Personally I find the former concept less vague than the latter, since there is a bewildering array of potential definitions for social utility, before we even get in to personal utility. I can see how reasonable people would disagree, but I don’t see that coercion in Lib’s sense is “hopelessly” vague, just as I don’t dismiss all possible definitions of social utility as pointless.
And before you accuse me of raising a strawman, I do realise that you didn’t invoke the concept of social utility - I just picked it as an example of a concept on which numerous other governmental philosophies are based, just as libertarianism is on non-coercion. If it’s not one to which you subscribe, that’s fine, but I would be (genuinely) interested in knowing what you feel a good guiding principle should be.
(aside to SA): I’ve sent you two rounds of email from Yahoo to your Yahoo and Hotmail addresses. My email is a MESS. Give me a couple of days to go in with torches, hunting dogs and a search party. 
I think malice toward Lib is a more likely explanation. I had never heard the term before but to me – perhaps because I bear Lib no ill will – the meaning was both obvious and self-explanatory.
But you raise a good point. Despite the fact that the biblical reference has been made and a full explanation has been offered both to it and from my own viewpoint on it as one who was ignorant of the biblical reference, Lib is still being accused of calling the OP a gnat on a camel’s ass.
How can this be anything but dishonest?
:smack: My post above was to Squink.
Thanks, Zoe. I hope we are able to meet one day.
I have just looked over the thread in question. His exact words, as correctly quoted in this thread several times, were:
So he not only called MissTake “a gnat on a camel’s ass”, he said he was the one calling her that!
Your interpretation above may be what he really meant, but that is not what the words mean. I do not believe that any reasonable person could fail to interpret what he actually said as meaning anything very different from “I, Liberal, am not comparing MissTake to something impressively evil and cruel, like a monster. I, Liberal, am comparing her to something insignificant and irritating, like a gnat on a camel’s ass.”
Well I’m not quite sure nor quite care who was telling you all that but I don’t see how it’s in opposition to my point. Yes I’m sure we could all infer that part of your point is you’ll try but the other inference is “don’t expect too much”. Or did you honestly think some people expect perfection of you?
No need to feel like a wishbone. Did all those books you read give the same opinions? Different people are annoyed for different reasons- life’s a real nutcracker isn’t it.
Lamia, thank you for posting that. I haven’t re-read the thread and I can see how it would appear at a casual glance that Lib had indeed called her that. But as GIGObuster said earlier, context is everything. Lib was simply reiterating what he had said before, and he was speaking from the point of view of the client. But his choice of words was poor considering that he had an audience that was gunning for him. While I still don’t agree that he, himself, was calling her a gnat…etc., I can see how it would appear that way to someone else based on a cursory glance.
Thank you again for your post.
All that is fine insofar as it goes. You’re certainly correct that much of the value statements upon which western liberal democracy rests are also vague – equality, justice, due process and so forth.
What’s damnable about Lib’s formulation is the notion that the answer to any given problem set can be categorically derived from that brief statement of principle. He appears to think the answers to any real-world example to be obvious and unavoidable, as though it’s just a matter of chanting those magic words. Thus, Lib resists all efforts to flesh that starting principle out, to give it form beyond the extreme abstract.
Lib says “I oppose coercion.” To which Guin asks “what the heck does that mean?” To which Lib responds “it means I oppose initial force or deception.” Which is great and all, but it doesn’t give us much guidance for real-world situations. It just invites another round of definition-guessing: what’s initial force?
I can assure you, if I were to say “I believe in a right to (procedural) due process,” and someone asked me what the heck that meant, I could give them a shorthand answer (“fundamentally, the right to be heard, to have your say in matters that affect you”), but I could also lay out some concrete analysis for how that works in practice.
Opposition to “initial fraud and deception” might well be a dandy philosophy, but without more than the trite phrase, it really is too vague. It requires analysis and application to actual situations before it truly takes life, before people can genuinely understand how that principle operates. And it’s on that front that Lib regularly balks.
Perhaps half this thread would have been unnecessary had Liberal thought to add “…to him” at the end of that comment.