Look at post 63: this is the one that I thanked you for. Note the differences between it and your more recent replies to me: in that one, my quotes to which you responded were in quote tags, and your own text was outside of the quote tags.
Again, I think you are rewriting history in a fashion that makes the most appealing story for yourself; you’re not examining the facts with a critical mind.
Daniel
Guys, I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish here. Surely you don’t think this can be resolved through the application of facts and logic? I assure you, it can’t. This isn’t even like arguing about politics. If you give a list of compelling reasons why Kodos is better than Kang, you probably won’t change the mind of a stubborn Kang supporter, but at least you’ll give him/her something to think about, and might get a list of pro-Kang arguments in return.
To attack a belief like this though, you will be percieved as attacking something at the believer’s core. They will defend it like a Lioness defending her cub. The idea that they will argue according to standard rules for debate is like expecting you to fight according to the rules of Boxing if your life is in danger.
To Graham Wellington, sorry if this post sounds condescending. I hope you find what you need.
I’m trying to convince the guy that his life is not in danger. 
However, I hoped that, by showing a (very real) willingness to be persuaded by the evidence if it’s really as extraordinary as he claims, he’d be willing to listen to what I had to say in return.
Apparently not.
Daniel
In that post I didn’t need to dissect it and, as a point of fact, you never griped about how I replied in the following posts using the little arrows with my comments.
It must be nice to be so loved in this place that everybody and his mother would take your side no matter how much I destroy and lay to waste your arguments. I guess it’s to be expected, beings that I’m the new guy. (Too bad all these egos can’t see the bigger picture … as then there might be some chance to do some serious good for those that are in line to be harmed by a very, very serious hatefreak!)
I had an Aunt who was suffering from paranoid delusions. After a very long time the family managed to get her on some sort of meds. (Mostly I know the story through my Mom, her sister.) She reported to my Mom that when she was having the delusions she felt that she was at the center of the universe, involved in a great battle between good and evil with not just her soul, but the soul of millions of people at stake. To lose that was terrifying. It wasn’t just a matter of persuasion through evidence, it was the tearing away of a person’s core. The core may be re-built to something healthier, but it is a hideously painful process, and is nothing like, say, becoming convinced that a certain philosophical belief you have is in error. So in essence the sufferer’s life is in danger: The life as they have known it, with all it’s grand drama, is being threatened in a very real way.
A Beautiful Mind may not be a perfect movie, but one thing I liked about it was how it portrayed how real Nash’s delusions were. Even as brilliant a thinker as John Nash had a painful road to take, and was never completely free of his demons.
Be honest: are there any other possible interpretations?
I think I could blow your mind, but it would terrify you. Doing so might get you to understand what I’m talking about. Will you take the risk?
Daniel
CITE?!?!
I read it in LM Boyd’s The Grab Bag years ago. But I’m sure you can verify it if you look hard enough. (Actually, if you think about it, it does make sense that such would be the case … knowing you’re always taking big money from broken people and doing so very little to earn it. The guilt would be unbearable!)
Well, Cecil thinks it’s likely that shrinks have the highest suicide rate among health care professionals.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010420.html
And here’s what our own CK Dexter Haven has to say:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/msuicide.html/url]
But a bit of googling reveals that all the data is very inconclusive, and occupation may not be a good indicator of suicidal tendancies, as both Cecil and Dex admit.
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/msuicide.html
second attempt.
Or, it could be having to deal with other peoples’ problems.
If that were so, the suicide rate would be highest among politicians.
My MSNTV2 box doesn’t have high speed hooked up, so I can’t … .
It’s interesting that you would snip out what you did while knowing that I was only just beginning to make my case before the guy bailed on me.
I’m at fault for nothing.
No offense; but of all your weak responses, this is the weakest. Count your blessings that so many in this place are willing to come to your defense and try and make it seem that you’re in the right.
Please, don’t bail on me now. You’ll need to access that link “Listen to …” before you can understand what it is I’m trying to tell you. Perhaps a friend or colleague has the necessary hi-speed connection or, like Diogenes did, you could access the link at a library?
[ Moderator Mode ]
GrahamWellington, I have fixed the quotation tags in your response to Left Hand of Dorkness.
Please note that the way to interrupt another person’s text for the purpose of responding to individual lines is to place each section of their text inside the quote tags and leave your comments outside the quote tags. One way to get individual sections of text quoted is to highlight the text once it is in the response window, then click on the quotation icon (the little “quote balloon” on the right of the string of icons that begins with B I U in the response window).
Be sure to preview before submitting your response to mke sure that it looks the way you want it to.
(Some people dislike that manner of response, but I am addressing the technical issues, here.)
Like others, I did not even see that you had entered responses when you added those comments inside the quotation, compelling you to add the Xs.
[ /Moderator Mode ]
On second thought, I retract this offer: I do not think that what I had in mind would be ethical, and I apologize for making the offer in the first place.
No offense taken. Of all my responses, that was the one where I gave up on engaging you in debate, given your clear unwillingness to enter into it.
Daniel
[QUOTE=Larry Borgia]
according to standard rules for debate
Hey Larry.
But what happened was that he balked at that and someone else then made a lame attempt to FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS TO THE LETTER and petered out long before we even got started. And then from there – because everyone thought I’m supposed to reach through the screen and hand them the materials in question – the whole thread disintegrated to the point where the mods felt it necessary to move things over to the debate forum. So due to their laziness, and not my willingness to be a sport and make things known, we’ve been quibbling back and forth ever since.
Please be a good guy and explain what you mean by this: “according to standard rules for debate.”
Did you see in one of my recent posts how I stated to dorkness that in a court of law my means of getting to the truth would be regarded as being far superior to his empty bickering? It’s there; go check it out and, too, see his response(?) to it, as it showed beyond doubt that he’s in over his head and has totally lost his way.
So far, all the evidence demonstrates that he is right.
You keep harping on your superior logic, but you have not demonstrated any such thing.
You claim that a report of ritual abuse–a report much like many similar claims that have all shown to be false–“proves” that such abuse is going on. That is not logical.
No. The coincidence is that when you embedded your response along with the posts to which you were responding inside a single set of quotation tags, you made the text difficult to read. This is not what you had been doing “for a while now.” It is this sort of illogic–in which you claim as fact something that is not real–that diminishes your ability to communicate. As to your “devastating” post; it only devastated what little credibility you might have garnered prior to its posting. No one claimed you were doing “bad things” before you did the bad thing about which they complained. Assuming that your rather silly response to LHoD triggered some sort of reaction among the other posters because of its (nonexistent) brilliance and missing the fact that the response was to your messed up code is also illogical.
No one is going to jump through your hoops to discover whatever arcane message you believe you’ve found. If you cannot lay out the actual argument, citing the references to support your beliefs rather than sending people on snipe hunts to “discover” factoids, then you are wasting your time and theirs.
As LHoD has already pointed out, if the message you bring is so important, you should be finding ways to make it easy for everyone to hear it rather than creating a game of “scavenger hunt” to chase your clues around.
Actually, this is more of your illogic. In a court of law, the prosecutor would not send the judge and jury out to buy their own copies of the police reports or tell them to go to college to learn forensic investigation before he would “reveal” his case. The prosecutor brings the facts to the courtroom and presents them in ways that people unfamiliar with forensic science and even the law can understand the information well enough to decide the guilt or innocence of the defendant.
Your analogy is false and your attitude is worse.