Doppleganger!!!
Let me ask you a question-- what if your outdoor cat was going over in to the neighbor’s yard, as they are wont to do, and killing birds at the neighbor’s bird feeder? She might well be doing this daily without you knowing. What if your neighbor was like T.O. and assumed your cat was a feral, or just considered her a nuisance, and shot her with a BB gun?
I’m really not trying to antagonize you, just trying to get you to look at this another way. We only have T.O.'s word on these ferals, how much of a nuisance they are, etc. They might be someone’s outdoor cat(s), and someone very like yourself might be very upset if the cat was shot. You know what my solution would be-- keep your damn cat in the house-- but I realize many people do not agree. However, if people have free license to shoot at whatever cat appears on their property and bugs them, you will have outdoor housecats getting shot, and then what?
All will love me, and despair!
They’re illegal around here, but wouldn’t that be a hoot! 
A fair question, and you express things I’ve thought about a lot myself. I do worry for Pretty Black Girl. She does wander, but not far. She won’t go within thirty feet of a road, but she does meander over a few property lines. I know that one neighbor will not harm her, because she was actually born from the cat they once had. They’re the people who filled us in on her history. (She came with the house when we bought it.) But there are other neighbors that we don’t know as well. We do our best to check on her from time to time. We bring her inside every night. (The whole basement area is hers — the library, the sewing room, and the garage.) It would devastate me if she died at the hands of a cruel neighbor, and I would likely at least contemplate lashing out in some way. But in the end, two things trump all: (1) it is MY fault if she is shot on a neighbor’s land, and (2) I MUST protect the fish. They are the most helpless creatures you can imagine, stuck as they are in a very small world. So, yeah. You raise a good point, and it’s one that pet lovers and homeowners need to think about.
But it is attempting to say something about the subject, not the author.
If Joe Racist says “All niggers are fools,” his having said this says more about Joe Racist than it does about black people, but what he said says more about black people than it does about Joe Racist.
Similarly, in some contexts, one’s having said “you sicken me” may say more about the speaker than about her subject. That seems to be what you’re saying about Opal’s comment. But what one says in saying “you sicken me” says, (if not “more about the subject than about the speaker,” then) at least enough about the subject of the utterance to count as being intended to insult.
“You sicken me” in almost any context I can think of (including the one under discussion) has much the same force as a comment that “one ought to be sickened by you.” They don’t mean exactly the same thing, of course, but the intended rhetorical force is practically the same in both cases. Now, one can avoid this kind of rhetorical force when saying “you sicken me” by going on to say something like “but I recognize that’s a problem with me, not a problem with you.” (“Fat people disgust me, but I believe I am in the wrong to have such a reaction.”) In the absence of such ameliorating comments, however, a comment such as “you sicken me,” especially if reinforced by comments like “I wish you had never come to exist,” and so on, retains its normative rhetorical force. It amounts to a claim that one ought to be sickened by the person, and that the person ought not to ever have come to exist, and so on. These are clearly insulting sentiments.
If someone tells you you sicken them, I believe you when you say you would not feel insulted, but it is hard for me to believe you would not recognize they are attempting to insult you. And as far as I can tell (having thought about this for all of about 10 seconds I guess) insulting is exactly the same thing as attempting to insult. (What other actions have this structure? “To X is the same thing as to attempt to X.”) So to recognize something as an attempted insult is (or should be) to recognize it as an insult (even if only one that is unsuccessful in some sense).
-FrL-
damn you Carnalk, you stole my post.
ahh, good times killen gophers. i miss the old days.
Well, if the first couple of posts were about using dynamite in the gopher holes, or smuggling a kimono dragon in to eat the gophers, or catching them and putting them in a stew that you serve at a soup kitchen for the homeless… well…
A kimono dragon? Is that an oriental species?
Would stand to reason. So’re komodos.
It serves tea, wears a kimono, and appears in The Zork Chronicles, a book by George Alec Effinger, along with Glorian(?) of the Knowledge. GotK also appeared in Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson. I know of no other instances of kimono dragons in this or any other world.
Since the other thread didn’t include any of those things I can only imagine you’re randomly referring to some 80’s movies rather than answering a simple fucking question.
And Rubystreak, synopsis: you said people defending the troll would be super embarrassed, I said I wasn’t embarrassed to defend his thread, you said then I’m a moron for feeding the troll, I said “that’s not feeding”, then you said “well then i wasn’t talking about you, douche bag”, and now I say “u r dum”.
And Aceospades, I knew there had to be a couple of gopher killing punks out there in Doperland. 
I’ll have to try to dig up a copy of The Zork Chronicles (is that related to the old text computer game?) I’m familiar with the Maureen Birnbaum stories, having read a few of them in various magazines and anthologies, but I don’t think I have a copy of the complete collection.
Good luck finding either book. The MB,BS is not the complete collection of Muffy’s adventures, but it has lots of the stories in it. And yes, the chronicles are based on the old text game. It covers Zork I and some of Zork II.
No, I said they’d feel that little sting of knowing they were also trolled by the troll, because all these reactions are feeding him. If you somehow read that as “super embarrassed,” then you have that comprehension problem I’ve been saying you have all along. THAT is embarrassing.
Oh, bullshit. Why do you want to start shit with me? Having a bad ego day? Let me break it down for you:
Little sting =/= super embarrassed. We’ve all rushed to defend people who turned out to be trolls, CarnalK, you of all people should acknowledge that. Some people turn it into an avocation.
Later on, I said, NOT TO YOU:
I think my point is legitimate, that it’s not worth getting all worked up by a troll post and people’s reaction to it. You don’t agree, fine. But I still haven’t addressed Your Majesty. You then roll up with this:
Being your usual charming, hyperbolic, defensive self, you jump on my shit. Unprovoked, I might add, unless me saying that getting all worked up by trolling is not a worthwhile pursuit somehow offends you and warrants your shitpile here. At no point did I address you or anythind you’d said; that was an assumption on your part.
I said back:
And you, genius that you are, respond with:
I never said you were feeling a troll. YOU stated that you thought I was accusing you of that, and started with the namecalling, defensive idiocy. Now that it’s all laid out there for you, in refutation of your version of events, I hope that you now realize that…no, really, it was all you.
NO, U
Perhaps I can explain the notion of “joke” to you sometime? I thought “kimono dragon” was pretty much a clue.
However, my point (what was the question again, anyhow?) was that these things are situational. If I wander into a thread on account of someone reported it, and I see something in the wrong forum, I move it. And if it appears to be about engaging in illegal (in most of the U.S.) activites, then I close it.
A few points to make about that:
(1) Moderators do not have the time, references, or legal authorization to investigate whether a discussion is indeed about illegal activities. We make our best guess and move on. We do NOT want to let six weeks go by, with a flurry of lawyers and paralegals (at $$$ per hour) looking up citations, to decide, oh, gee, yeah, I guess it was illegal and we should have closed it six weeks ago.
(2) If there is ample grounds for thinking that the discussion was NOT about illegal activities, the thread can always be re-opened. A moderator’s actions are not indelible.
(3) I think that the question that you’re bitching about is whether a thread about gopher-removal would also be closed. My comment above was intended to be a reminder that it’s all situational. It depends on what’s being asked and what people are saying. When I read the first post and it has to do with someone sitting on the porch shooting guns at anything wandering by his property, that sounds pretty much illegal to me. Although, I suppose, if he were shooting at children out trick-or-treating, that would probably be OK under Section 43(b)(iii) of the tax code.*
- [sub]This is another joke, CarnalK.[/sub]
So then next year, after I have (presumably) bought a house, when I decide that I need a little late-October sport it would not be a good idea to start a “What would the best ammo to use for hunting trick-or-treaters” thread?
I pretty much agree with **Dex ** here. The last thing we need is mods interpreting actual law.
Yeah, that would generally be frowned upon.
(Besides, it depends on whether you are hunting them for meat or for sport. Meat - 7mm is fine. Sport - .410 loaded with snakeshot.)