Quote:
Originally Posted by BigV
When I am being condescended to, I consider the source. If it is one that is worthy of my respect, then I reflect on my own behavior and attitudes, searching for what is in me that warranted such communication. You imply with your remarks that I am being stupid, stupid enough to embarrass myself.
This is multiply erroneous:
1 -- I am not stupid. Nor are my posts here evidence of stupid. I would agree that engaging you in this kind of serious fashion is borderline stupid, and quixotic at best.
2 -- In practically every area where we have social intercourse, but most especially regarding politics and human relations, you are not a source worthy of my respect. This makes my self check very quick, practically moot. Your remarks do not hurt me. Your opinion of me is a matter of monumental indifference to me. You have show over a very long time that you do not care for me, or for the other dwellars here. It is precisely because of this long established behavior that your rebukes like this do not sting. All of your comments like this therefore have have no corrective power. They rise only to the level of irritating noise.
So, you are right, I do know what to do. I will filter out such noise so I can continue to focus on the communication here, offered by those dwellars that are worthy of my respect.
|
Well, V, after a couple of days for thought, this is what I've got.
There is no obligation upon me to respect that which is stupid. There is instead an obligation to challenge it. Showing certain of the more mulish anticonservative bigots the error of their thinking is sometimes like explaining anal sex to an echidna: certain referents seem to be wholly lacking.
It is not the persons, in essence, that I disdain, but the collectivist, aye socialist, ideals and the stupid ideas the ideals engender which I disparage, deprecate, blast and damn severally and collectively. I am a man of freedom, and unfreedom is a worthless abomination which helps millions to stunted lives and premature deaths. He who would reduce liberty is your enemy and mine, and your children's also, regardless of his -- or Michelle O's -- intentions at the outset. It is a thing that turns Earth into Camazotz.
The only known way to introduce socialism into the social order of the United States is to insist at every turn that it is not socialism. How many here are buying that denial? Does that sound a) smart, or b)not smart?
Taking me seriously involves taking virtue seriously. V is telling me he has great difficulty with taking me seriously, apparently because he finds me abrasive, and I am not going to deny being abrasive for a moment. He may also say abrasiveness erodes virtue. Mm -- it could if it's used wrongly. Too, a virtuous life, value given to virtue, a virtuous philosophy of life and being -- these are things that reproach those pseudosophisticates who think a good life can be lived without virtue, on the grounds that virtue is "not modern, not with-it."
Well, I hang out on another BBS, the Armour Archive, where a good many 21st-century people make a big thing, and a good thing, of virtue. They are the sort of people who would not seek in the State a surrogate parent. That's a thing which is bad for both parents and state -- and it bleeds the economy to anemia.
V, I have never thought you stupid, nor warped like two or three Dwellars I could name. I do have to work to keep you and xoxoBruce straight, so similar are your writing styles and philosophies -- I hope never to mix up which of you said what, and I figure the two of you would get along ever so well on a long road trip or a Carnival Lines cruise. I have held for years the opinion your heart stays in the right place, even if your head does not always. I hold that belief now.
You should not confuse an inclination to pout at me for annoying you with a matter of respect, though. There, you're kidding yourself. You can neither diminish me nor build up yourself by sneering. If you flee from me, you cut yourself off from something good that I have and you may never have sought: the pursuit of that virtue which makes a life worth the having lived it.