When chastised for falsely accusing another poster of intemperate actions, you have fallen back on the claim that you are being (baselessly) attacked for holding heterodox opinions. If you will notice (if you ever recover from your busy schedule to re-read the thread from which this began), you were not the only poster in that thread championing the cause of psychic abilities, yet you are the only one who has been Pitted.
The lesson is that if one chooses to falsely accuse other posters of intemperate behavior while demonstrating the very intemperance of which one falsely accused another, one is liable to find oneself the object of invective.
The other thread had its share of fairly hostile exchanges from both sides of the psychic gap. However, you were the only poster to accuse any other poster of bad behavior and you are the poster who has identified the actions of Ianzin as those of an “asshole” despite the fact that Ianzin was unfailingly polite in the other thread and has refrained from posting in this one.
No one has Pitted Lord Ashtar for believing he has psychic powers. No one has Pitted WOOKINPANUB for supporting the notion of psychic powers. And no one Pitted you for over four pages of exchange until you began taking personal swipes at Ianzin that lied about what and how he had posted.
The lesson is: treat other posters honestly and with some (probably minimal) level of respect and do not lie about their behavior.
Ok, I reread the thread (twice) and I can see I got confused. The hostility was coming from everywhere, and perhaps I lashed out at an innocent target. I don’t see innocence anywhere, though. But maybe, I just need to calm down.
It’s ironic, really. All this talk about psychic powers, and for a little while, I started to question myself and my own experiences. Then, I had another “event” last night. I knew, before the phone even rang, what it was about. (I probably saw it coming – I told him to stop throwing rocks at cars, someone might see him. Sure enough, someone did.) Or is that just intuition?
What’s really bizarre…well, under normal circumstances I’d start an MPSIMS thread about this situation. (Not the psychic twinge, but the phone call itself.) But…not now. I’m sure you understand why. Bad timing, bad fucking timing.
And I can’t shake the feeling that this was all planned by higher forces. Maybe it was for the best? After all, I did write two pages of a chapter I’ve been stuck on for weeks. It required a very uncomfortable frame of mind, and hey, all of a sudden I was there. So mabye, that’s the reason for it all. It’s all subjective, after all. Isn’t it?
Please show where anyone was hostile before you slandered ianzin. While you are at it, explain how you could lash out at an innocent target if there was no innocence anywhere. And if this is your attempt at an apology to** ianzin**, then you have taken mealy-mouthed into uncharted waters. FinnAgain–shame on you.
I wasn’t going to particpate in this thread, but there’s just one small correction to offer in the interests of accuracy. I don’t know about elsewhere, but here in the UK, a ‘slander’ is in essence a spoken defamatory remark and a ‘libel’ is a written one (these are approximate definitions, not tight legal ones).
In the ‘Ask The Psychic’ thread to which most of this thread refers, I never claimed that KGS had slandered me (or libelled me). I said he had cast a slur on my character, by insinuating either that I will do anything for money, or that money is my sole / principal motivation, and I posted some facts to the contrary.
I don’t think so. If it is, then that itself is an objective statement. It can’t all be subjective.
As I see it, either you are psychic or you’re not, assuming agreed-upon definitions of psychic, you, and are. Your experiences may lead you to believe that you are, but you could be mistaken. My experiences may lead me to believe that you are not, but I could be mistaken. If I believe you’re not psychic (which I do), and you believe you are psychic (which you do), then one of us is incorrect.
When I say you’re not psychic, that’s not a prejudiced view, because quite literally I’m not prejudging (well, sorta). I’ve read a tremendous amount on psychic powers, having been fascinated by them as a child and convinced of them as a teenager. I reached the conclusion that they probably don’t exist only slowly and reluctantly; I hate not believing in them. y world became a little less beautiful when I reached that conclusion. But the more I read, the less I could believe in them.
Perhaps I’m prejudging you. but I do that in many ways. I believe, for example, that you’re a human, and if you tell me that you’re actually a bonobo, a screwdriver, or an artificial intelligence, I will believe that you’re incorrect. My belief that you’re not psychic is very closely analogous to my belief that you’re human, in terms of the prejudice that it demonstrates.
I was using this definition rather than a legal definition.
Message boards have somewhat blurred the line between “spoken” and “written” due to their real time character. However, definition two seems appropriate regardless.
Yup. He asked if he had to spoilerbox his prediction of the result of a game that wasn’t played yet, since he knew who was going to win. It turned out he was wrong and then reinterpreted his dream to rationalize this.
Thank you, ianzin, for sticking up for me. You’re a mensch. That’s really what set me off, the accusation of slander. That was right out of line. (Never mind the libel/slander distinction, that means nothing.)
Funny, everyone’s blaming me for my poor choice of words, and yet…well, never mind.
To be fair the distinction in this country between slander and libel is what is “transitory” and what is “permanent”, so recorded works can be considered libel, even though they are spoken. In this day and age I think the distinction is somewhat meaningless. If you must have the offence combine them both into something like “defamation” then in the judgement you could take into account the transitory/permanent nature of the offence.
But that is beside the point. Ianzin has got himself involved in another pit thread in only a month. The guy is obviously a troublemaker. Someone better alert the mods to him.
Which is the problem isn’t it? Logically, what you say is correct. Psychic power either exists, or it doesn’t. Somehow, we’ve got to apply that type of objective proof, to a (mostly) subjective phenomenon.
One thing I noticed from the anti-psychic crowd…they were demanding an impossible level of proof. Roll a number between 1 and 100, and guess it? What kind of fucking coin’s on my desk? Give me a break. Psychics are NEVER that accurate. And they are LYING if they say they are.
Think of it this way. “Psychic ability” is a skill, like “baseball ability”. Barry Bonds, he has “baseball ability”, I think we can all agree on that. And yet, not even he can hit a homerun (or the bull, and get a free steak) on every single pitch thrown at him. Just getting to first base, 33% of the time, is considered very successful baseball ability.
We should hold psychic ability (whatever the hell it really is) to the same standard as baseball ability. Not the level of proof required to show that CH4 + O2 = CO2 + 2 H2O every single time.
Ok, that’s a fair explanation. My experience with the world is different, though. The longer I live, the more obvious it becomes that something is out there. Maybe if you had experiences similar to mine, you would reach the same conclusion. But hey, that’s life. (Literally.)
What are these experiences, for which the best explanation is psychic powers? Please don’t try any of the “it wouldn’t mean anything to you” or “no point in telling you because you’d never accept it” defenses.
Hey fucknut, I made a mistake. Give it a rest, okay? I said already, psychic ability is not 100% reliable. You are truly deluding yourself, if you assume that one person’s failed attempt is PROOF that it can never be done.
Besides…I think it’s funny, that the whole intent of that thread, actually did succeed several weeks later. Lost the battle, but won the war. And I can’t even claim psychic ability on that one, because it was clearly either coincidence, or the action of someone else entirely. (Assuming, of course, manhattan was telling the truth about why he quit the SDMB.)
But…still, I like to think it had some effect. No way to prove it, I know. And I don’t even really believe it. But it feels good to think that way.
It wouldn’t mean anything to you, and there’s no point in telling you because you’d never accept it. Sorry, that’s the only answer that applies to your bonehead question.
Do you want me to write a book about my whole life, from beginning to end?? That’s the only way you would understand…and only if you really cared enough to listen. Which, clearly, you don’t. “Understanding” is not your intention at all.
Go stand in the corner with Contrapuntal, little man.
Never said that, my little jester. All I wanted was to expose your lies about never having taken the stance that psychic powers exist. How about explaining why you lied?
Besides, it wasn’t your failed prediction that was the true candy in that thread, it was your after-the-fact rationalization.
Man, there’s just no way to get you fluffbrains to answer honestly, is there? When I close the usual escape routes in advance, you bash the doors in.
No, I just want to know what led you to believe that psychic powers exist.
So you saw that I was closedminded right away, too?
Read the fucking thread again, you festering hyena stool. I said, somewhere in there, that psychic ability is not 100% reliable. In fact, someone else (glee, was it?) insisted I prove THAT assertion. What kind of logic is that?
You’re not looking for answers at all. You’re looking for a fight, and you started long before this Pit Thread. You’re not the only one, either.
