Oliver said:
In both examples, he just asked for permission to continue his lecture
uninterrupted. In neither examples did he counter the claim that he was an
idiot or that his theories made no sense.
It was clear that he rejected such claims in the second.
If the entire crowd is asking him to leave, then probably the entire
crowd consists of die-hards.
A situation with no analogy here. Some of this thread's participants
have behaved mildly (and chiefly discussed Eclipse or Java, at that).
And of course there is an unknown but probably nonzero number of
lurkers.
If some of the crowd was undecided, then he
could ask all those who are uninterested in hearing the rest of his lecture
to leave, and for the rest to remain and hear the rest of his lecture.
Well, I suppose I *could* try asking Attardi et. al. politely to leave
the newsgroup, but I doubt it would work. (Even asking Attardi alone to
leave the thread didn't work; he kept saying he would, and then making
a liar of himself. At least three times now, and counting...)
Right, you have some arguments explaining why it's impossible, but these
arguments are not very convincing to me if there do indeed exist some people
for whom this is true.
As I explained elsewhere, those people are clearly special cases owing
to substantial fame or other factors.
Yes, the ones I could name that you would probably be celebrities by
virtue of both you and me knowing about them. I'm thinking of Buddha (spl?),
Ghandi, etc.
You've picked some astonishingly poor examples. The one is reputed to
have committed suicide and may not have actually existed anyway (no
archaeological evidence or factual-type historical documentation, for
starters); the other was actually assassinated.
The implication is that people who don't do anything about arseholes
that mudsling at them in public either end up suicidal or get killed
before that can happen by the people the mudslingers eventually
convinced to hate them!
Your examples therefore support *my* position far more than they
support yours. By rebutting the insults it is entirely possible that I
am avoiding an early death, based solely on your latter example.
Actually, I think they became famous because they had found this shield
(as opposed to they were shielded because they had become famous).
I disagree.
You can say bad things about Buddha, Ghandi, et all, but I don't think
these bad things would harm them. I think Ghandi even directly addressed
being insulted as part of his strategy for success: "First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
No doubt this is while constantly doing things that prove "them" wrong,
rather than doing nothing to exert an opposite influence on the minds
of bystanders.
Although this is inconsistent with your earlier suggestion that he did
nothing at all (and eventually some roused rabble got up the gumption
to kill him).
And now, of course, they have golden reputations. There's only a few
spots near the top of a pyramid; that's why whatever that mysterious
Nigerian email seems to imply, only a small minority of us can ever be
rich. Or have untarnishable reputations, or whatever. It's also been my
observation that being dead helps tremendously, but by then you're way
past caring...
You and I have had different experiences, which would explain why we
have different outlooks on life.
But that doesn't make the situation symmetrical. You can't prove your
negative ("no harm is done"), but I can prove my positive and
*dis*prove your negative. The latter only requires one counterexample,
and I have a hat full of them, so you can't even claim that it was some
sort of fluke or one-off.
I wasn't suggesting you become a monk either. Just that you do as I do,
if you want the same kind of success I've been having.
What kind of success have you been having? My own simulations indicate
that you:
a) Get embroiled in usenet fights (this one, for starters) same as I
b) Have an unknown but growing number of enemies spreading rumours
about you behind your back. So do I, but you aren't even trying to
combat them or refute them or hinder their recruiting efforts. It's not
hard to guess then which of us will get assassinated first.
Recall though that's it's easier to change yourself than to change the
word around you.
What happened to "to thine own self be true"? Lately all the self-help
moro^H^H^H^Hgurus have done a nearly perfectly choreographed
simultaneous about-face and suggested everyone be real pliant and
changeable. That seems to lie somewhere between "chronically dishonest"
and "floormat" on the personality-type spectrum, and neither of those
happens to appeal to me in the slightest. And it probably means some
negative feeling is being suppressed and festering. Sufficiently
masterful self-delusion can even keep it from conscious awareness
pretty much right up until the moment when you explode and take out
half your office floor with a shotgun before decorating the boss's
corner office's big picture window with your own brain matter.
You know what? I think I've got this pegged. You're an idealist and I'm
a pragmatist.
A: "Hey, what's up, B? How are you doing?"
B: "I didn't set fire to the orphanage!"
A: "Huh?"
B: "Uh... nothing... What's up?"
B's claim "I didn't set fire to the orphanage" actually increases the
listener's credence in the hypothesis that B actually did, in fact, set fire
to the orphanage.
Because they were the first to mention the event (and then with a
vehement denial). It's quite another matter if someone accuses them of
it first, and they *reply* with a vehement denial. An innocent person
will always react with a vehement denial. Some guilty persons also
will. Anyone who just gets all quiet like is certainly involved
somehow, perhaps guilty of the offence itself or perhaps a witness that
is being intimidated or who participated in something that went too far
over his objections, but involved.
But back to your situation: perhaps people are developing poor opinions
of you, without actually really reading the contents of your message.
To minimize the frequency of this, an insult has been followed
meticulously with a rebuttal in a direct follow-up and within 24 hours.
This maximizes the likelihood that anyone who sees the former sees both
of them.
Actually, it doesn't follow that any such attack must either be
mitigated or retaliated. You can react in any way you want, including
ignoring the so-called "attack".
Yes, just as it is also physically possible for me to ignore someone
charging at me with a knife. That doesn't make it wise.
I disagree that doing nothing encourages the attackers to continue.
What planet are you from again? If thieves rob a store and get thrown
in jail, they stop (at least until they get out again). If thieves rob
a store and get shot by the proprietor, or just scared shitless, or
beaten up or something, this hopefully discourages them from doing it
again. If thieves keep trying to rob stores and being foiled by clever
locks or alarm systems, they should get discouraged and quit trying as
it's wasting their time and frustrating them. If on the other hand
thieves rob a store and get off scot-free, on the other hand, they've
just learned that robbing stores is easy money and carries little risk
of adverse consequence. If a whole society behaves as you recommend,
the robbers end up owning everything, and everyone else winds up in the
poorhouse. There is an exact analogy with any other crime and, indeed,
with any other antisocial, hostile act that harms others.
If I let people who harm me get away with it, and society also lets
them get away with it (and in a lawless place like usenet the latter
will always happen), then they learn that they can have their way with
me and I won't resist, and that is the LAST thing I want these fuckers
to learn.
Doesn't the solipsim assume that you can control all of reality? I
thought I was being clear in saying that it's much harder to change the
world around you than to change yourself, thus implying that yourself and
the world around you are two distinct things, which contradicts solipsism.
OK, not solipsism exactly, but retreating into your own fantasy world
by whatever name you'd call that. Retreating totally from the world
because it's too damn hard to change it. (And you called *me* lazy?
It's in the nature of tool-using primates to change rather than accept
the things they don't like about their environment; you are behaving
rather more like a mouse or some other non-sentient, non-tool-using
denizen of this planet, from all indications.)
If you're playing a losing game, your score can only get lower and
lower. The "trick" to "winning" a losing game is to quit as early as
possible, so as to lose as little as possible.
Unacceptable. If I were to believe that it is a "losing game" with no
way out, then an unacceptable conclusion would be inescapable. Anyone
could, at any time, do irreversible harm to me simply by insulting me
publicly. If you're to be believed, nothing at all that I do will
mitigate the damage or deter such attacks.
It then follows that anyone can harm me with complete impunity at any
time, with real negative consequences for me, zero for him, and no way
for me to undo the damage or convince him not to do it again (and
again, and again).
That conclusion leads in turn to a conclusion that to strive is futile,
because enemies (and there are always enemies, since no-one can please
100% of the people 100% of the time) will always be able to destroy it
all and undo everything and ruin my life on a whim and at a moment's
notice and without any chance of my preventing this or even taking them
down with me.
There are three possibilities. I can believe as you apparently do, and
conclude that it's all futile because there's nothing I can do to
prevent the enemy (any enemy) from destroying me at any time, and
there's no way I can prevent ever having an enemy, in which case I
don't try to accomplish anything since it's useless anyway, and a bad
outcome results; I can continue to believe as I do, but you happen to
be right, and a bad outcome results; or I can continue to believe as I
do, you turn out to be wrong, and a good outcome may result.
Note that the only chance of a good outcome requires that I *not*
believe you.
Therefore, I won't.
I'd tell you that you don't have to worry about me tricking you, as I
don't really care what you end up doing, but maybe that's all part of my
trick, to get you to lower your guard.
Well, either it's a trick or you're as thick as two planks.
After
all I've done, including provide evidence that verbal attacks
(especially persistent ones) cause genuine tangible harm, you still
don't believe me. Worse, I don't think you even thought the two moves
further ahead that were sufficient to see that your belief leads to a
conclusion of futility. If being insulted automatically enters you
unwillingly into a losing game, with genuinely negative consequences,
then since there's no practical way short of hermitude to prevent that
ever happening *life* is a losing game in which nothing you do will
matter, because eventually everyone will hate you and not care what you
accomplished in your life. As soon as you believe anything that leads
to such a conclusion, you *have* lost the game -- permanently, unless
you one day change your mind.
Of course, there's also empirical evidence that you're wrong. If it is
an automatically losing game, which anyone can force you into at any
time (one insult does the job), then anyone can ruin your life without
any way for you to stop them succeeding, and sooner or later someone
will dislike you enough to do so. Only being a hermit might save you
from that eventual fate. It follows that nobody who is elderly or
actually dead should have good reputations, save perhaps hermits.
Since there are plenty of examples of people (nobodies and celebrities
alike) who died at a ripe old age with a reasonable reputation, it
follows that you were wrong.
