Istead of dragging in all your “we can’t help you because / you should get a lawyer”,** none of which **has to do with law/equity, findings, conclusions and evidence…why not just skip the thread? The ORIGINAL thread?
If the pit thread was the starting point, you’d be right. It wasn’t.
No, actually, it was, both in FACT AND “in effect”: Why do lawyers insist on telling me what I really mean? (like you just did, in case the underlining and bold and size and color didn’t make that clear.)
And there’s been so much MORE of that going on, it blows my mind.
I thought you guys dealt with facts, not speculation? I thought that was the whole point of the anal-retentive details regarding evidence? If we get to jsut make shit up and attribute it to people because we think we know better, why the hell is anyone bothering with law school, anyone can do THAT.
I find myself bitching about people misinterpreting me, Jodi, not because what I ACTUALLY SAY is so incredibly difficult to understand, it’s because people do what YOU JUST DID. My Pit thread was extremely specific! Please, go read it again, I’ll wait here.
My pit thread is a rant about lawyers I’d encountered recently telling me they couldn’t answer questions seeking knowledge because it was “advice”, it isn’t. I was very, very specific, and I was specific that it was the assertion that my questions are in fact advice, it was not the refusal to be helpful itself. It was WHY. It was telling me I asked for something I do not want. It was telling me that the character and nature of my questions are something they aren’t. It was telling me that they knew what I really meant, no matter what it looked like on the outside.
Maybe most people do have a hard time accurately conveying what they mean. Maybe most people, when they say: “Can you tell me if you’ve ver seen a case like this” really want it serve as a coy kind of code for “Help! Tell me what I should do! Save me!” But that isn’t true of me. I do not speak between the lines. I say what I mean. I mean what I say. Take it at face value. Insert nothing. Assume nothing. Fill in nothing. If the face value of my words do not make sense on their face, fine. Reject them since they are not understandable. (My claim is not that I am always excellent at accurately conveying my meaning, only that I never intend another meaning and that, generally speaking, what I said is what I meant and requires no interpretation of an unspoken agenda.)
DO NOT INTERPRET AND ASSUME and seriously, do not interpret and assume and then tell me you know better than I do what I really intended.
Because then, I might have to beat you senseless.
And I suck at that, being fundamentally a very peaceful person.
And the pile on that followed was a bunch of people trying to tell me that ALL requests for information ARE IN FACT requests for advice.
THEY ARE NOT.
People can and will misinterpret what lawyers tell them. They will misunderstand and misinterpret their relationships with lawyers. They will also lie and make stuff up. And they will sometimes try to make hay from that.
None of which transforms my requests and my intentions into something they are not, and you and a thousand other people telling me they do is like telling me the emperor is bundled up in wool when his dick his plainly hanging out.
A: People can fuck with lawyers when lawyers didn’t really do what people think they did.
B: The argument has been that because A is true, all requests for information or knowledge are, in fact, requests for advice.
C: The legal cites that have been offered thus far prove A, not B.
I accept A. I do not accept B. Stop telling me that A = B. It doesn’t. It never will. Be accurate, be precise, don’t try to tell me I’m a crazy impossible nutjob because I don’t accept a bullshit premise because a dozen lawyers are telling me to. Especially when they have not done a thing to prove B, only A.
I can see the emperor’s dick, goddamnit.
Yeah, well, sometimes you don’t have to say things right out loud, your actions speak for themselves.
More of the same assertions. The pit thread was about lawyers who said that to me and it was a bitch about that particular interaction, not a lumping of all lawyers into a big unethical group.
If you are referring to my later posts after being roasted over the coals by the lawyers around here, that doesn’t count either. Again, if you can go back and show me where I “laid the groundwork” (a phrase denoting the early phases of a project, the very beginning) for these legal discussions and requests for discussions by stating that as a group, lawyers are unethical, incompetent and unfair they are, I’d like to see it. Simply saying I did doesn’t qualify.
And, finally, for the record… I give people the same respect I ask in return: I do not assume people meant something other than what they said. I do not read between other people’s lines and presume to tell them that they really intended something else. I take people at their word. Often to my detriment, since by its very nature this means I trust people as rule before they have actually earned my trust and long after I should have realized they were not to be trusted.
But it’s the only way I know to be in the world, and it isn’t always a good thing, because often people do expect to have their secret underlying truth just “understood”, like the wife assuming the husband should just “know” that she really didn’t mean it when she said she didn’t want any fuss made for her birthday. Well, I’m that husband. You tell me you don’t want fuss, I ain’t gonna make any, because I think you mean it. It is too damn hard to try and figure people out and too easy to get it wrong, so I just go with what people actually say.
ESPECIALLY (and I want to open a debate thread about this, actually, I just don’t have time) because we are all different. We are raised differently, we have different family cultures, block cultures, city cultures, etc. What is wonderful, rude, expected in my house may be exacty opposite in yours. It’s so unfair to expect me to understand your code beyond the most obvious things (no stealing, lying, say thank you, etc.). If I don’t it says nothing about how I feel about you or whether I care. It says I don’t relate to your feelings. But if you tell me what they are, if you explain to me what your expectations and desires are, then I can either rise to meet them or not. But if your primary expectation and desire is that I somehow manage to figure out what all your other expectations and desires are, I will fail you, guaranteed.
And, again, that’s what I do. I just say exactly what i mean. If I secretly want a fuss made over my birthday, I either stop keeping it a secret and just come right out and ask people to make a fuss, or i am sad that I don’t get the fuss. But I NEVER resent or am hurt by the fact that no one really knew my secret desire. How could they if I never said it?
(It’s lovely when people DO figure us out accurately. But that doesn’t mean we should expect it or base our reactions on expecting it.)
Man, I’ve got shit to do. Later.