ESR's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto

[Griff]

X, I resent not making your list. Maybe its my own fault for getting tired of the inconclusive discussions and moving on. Up until 911 the folks here were pretty rational about this stuff, since 911 they've lost their minds, but thats representative of the rest of the country. I've been throwing the Chalmers Johnson at them occasionally but have made no headway. I was quite pleased when you picked up the baton and was quite willing to let you run with it. Maybe we should have spelled you, I daresay the rest of us enjoyed your input. Come back any time, yours is a valuable voice here.

[Undertoad]

My "dig" referenced your style because I refuse to even address arguments so full of ad hominem. I won't talk with people who do that kind of thing with malicious intent, why should anyone?

I will miss you if you go, but I press you with this: why would you want to hang around someplace where everyone agrees with you? Why would you be so mad at people who disagree with you? Why do you want to judge them not only incorrect, and ignorant, but aggressively, willfully so?

Most people who disagree with you aren't somehow basically broken; they just come at things from a different point of view than you do. You study things in depth from your direction, and so things that appear to be blatantly obvious to you may be blind spots to others. (And to others, the blatantly obvious for them is sometimes a blind spot for you.)

To take the step of deciding that those who disagree with you are in fact basically faulty is very intellectually dishonest. You do yourself a disservice. By coming to that conclusion, you ignore their points of view entirely. It closes your mind to the fact that there are many points upon which they are right and you are wrong. You think you cannot learn from them, so there is no point to sticking around.

See, nobody is always right. I made that my user title partly to remind myself that I'm sometimes wrong. Probably often wrong. The goal is not to be insecure in my own thoughts, but to allow myself to learn from others.

So when you say "you are wrong" in big bold letters -- call me "incredibly ignorant", "naive", etc. -- hey, I agree with you. I also find that it says much more about you than it does about me.

[hermit22]

X, you can't go. It will just thin our numbers on this board. Do you really want to see this board become dominated by people like Maggie?

[Kutz]

X, leave and I eat your brains.

MaggieL, be so kind as to educate us on the constitution of your evolved moral compass.

It must lack exclusion of the double standard. There can be no other reason why you would be so quick to dismiss THEIR acts as pure evil and OUR acts as... misunderstandings, perhaps?

Both we and the terrorists have been in the wrong. Nobody is apologizing for them. Nobody wants to send them chocolates and cards of apology. Just as no terrorist is apologizing for US international policy.

And you're right, nobody can just stand around waiting to be attacked. But that isn't what's happening. We're provoking the attack. We continue to provoke the attack, and this knowledge comes as a direct result of studying their motives and beliefs. In such a manner, a change in foreign policy could help to avert further terrorist acts and perhaps save many, many lives.

It's important not to consider the situation in terrible extremes. We are right to try and defend ourselves by preventing further terrorist attacks - but that doesn't necessarily mean fighting back with guns and tanks and smart bombs.

So, is it appeasement, then? No. Appeasement means that we allow a direct plan of aggression. Letting Iraq invade Poland would be appeasement. Letting the Al Qaeda make a few more attacks to avoid trouble would be appeasement. Checking US policy to avoid offending the sovereign rights of others is not appeasement, it's diplomacy.

I'm not saying you're wrong to want to defend yourself, or to be angry at the terrorists who comitted these acts, or to want to fight back. More important than "fighting is wrong" - which is fairly hard to verify - is "fighting sucks." So we have to avoid it when possible. And in this case, avoiding it would probably lend us to the superior alternative.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Xugumad

I wrote very carefully about "civilians" and "innocents" and uninvolved parties.

The victims of the terroist attacks on WTC were 100% "civilians" and "innocents"...in fact they were the *intentional targets* of the attacks. The military *responses* to those attacks have made every effort to *avoid* civilian casualties. It's not a double standard.I just don't accord folks who hijack airplanes and deliberately fly them into buildings full of civilians or wrap themselves in high-explosives and shrapnel and dentonate in a shopping mall the same standing I do to the military who *respond* to those attacks under orders to deny the attackers further sanctuary so they can strike again.

If there's "equivalance" there, I don't see it. I'm not going to be able to reach agreement with someone whose values make those two kinds of acts equivalant; they're colorblind in a range where I see colors. Just because an act is violent doesn't make it automatically wrong. *That's* a moral compass more evolved than "war is evil".

Kutz, what policy are you proposing, exactly? Our "provocation" consists of not simply giving these people what they demand. We don't run our foreign policy based on the wishes of whoever tried to kill us most recently...or even on whose voice is the most strident or empassioned in our own internal discourse.

"Respect for soveriegnty" is all well and good, but it is not absolute. Soveriegn states who cynically and knowingly shelter and support terrorists are engaging in warfare by proxy. Sooner or later sanctions escalate beyond the level of sharply worded diplomatic notes and unenforced Security Council resolutions. Soverign states who invade neighboring soverign states and are defeated in combat live by the terms of a cease-fire or suffer the consequences; just because hostilities are suspended doesn't mean the bazzar is open again.

I agree when you say "it's not wrong to <i>want</I> to defend yourself"...but you seem to insert "want" because you think it's wrong to actually *do* it, and that's where we part company.

(By the way, for people who are upset about ad hominems, in my view "that's a idiotic idea" is an opinion, "you're an idiot" is an epithet or a personality, "you're an idiot therefore your ideas are idiotic" is an ad hominem.)

[Griff]

Oh yah, one more thing X, the reason I drop by the Cellar is for the community of the place. We can get absolutely ugly when we think someone has their head up their tucus but the thing is we can also exchange music info, good reads, meteor talk, gaming if thats your bag, jokes eh David and sometimes we learn something in all these political blood baths. Maybe what you need to do, if you want to make the cellar work for you is to put a little more into the other forums.

[Chefranden]

Originally posted by MaggieL

Of course you don't. *snort* Of course everyone can see that your point of view is calm, reasoned and rational, whereas mine is a knee-jerk reflex.

*I* think you have made a mistake in suggesting that cortical thinking never results in self-defense behavior. (You'll know when I start thinking with my thinking with my limbic system, because my rate of fire will go cyclic. Very contrasurival.)

I also think you've confused neuropsychology with phrenology, because that's the approximate level of your analysis.

By the way, to hold that the US actions are equivalant to those of the Jihadists *is* to defend the Jihadists.

When all else fails try Ad Hominem right Maggie? That’s good fascist logic, hey girl! The old if you don’t agree with me you are evil ploy. That’s good. Bin Laden would be proud of you. Hell Himmler would be proud of you. There I feel better. I apologize for the Ad Hominem in return. Sigh, it would appear that I’m no better than you. But not really, because I didn’t mean it.

The victims of the terroist attacks on WTC were 100% "civilians" and "innocents"...in fact they were the *intentional targets* of the attacks. The military *responses* to those attacks have made every effort to *avoid* civilian casualties. It's not a double standard.I just don't accord folks who hijack airplanes and deliberately fly them into buildings full of civilians or wrap themselves in high-explosives and shrapnel and dentonate in a shopping mall the same standing I do to the military who *respond* to those attacks under orders to deny the attackers further sanctuary so they can strike again.

Self defenses takes place at the time of a hostile action, not months afterward. If some evening your neighbor threatens you with a weapon you may take action against him, but you may not go shot him in the morning even if you promise not to shoot his kids unless they are in the way. The action that Mr. Bush plans against Iraq in the near future is not self-defense it is an attack, during a time of no hostile action against us from those people. When the government takes certain actions that it knows will, in spite of being careful, cause thousands of casualties and then “intentionally” caries on with said action it is intentionally causing casualties. Saying oops I didn’t mean it doesn’t count in my book any way and it didn’t used to count in a court of law. If bin Laden were to have said oops I only meant to blow up the 20th floor, you wouldn’t have cut him any slack. Nor should you have. The atrocities of one side of a conflict do not justify atrocities of the other. The moral ball is always in our court, if we act as the enemy acts we are no better than he.

You haven’t made a case for bombing Afghanis, for bombing Iraqis, for killing children, for killing mothers, for killing fathers, or anyone else, except self-defense, which it is not, and worse we are the good guys because we’ll be careful therefore it’s ok.

[Tobiasly]

Hey X, I'll say this again. 95% of people don't consider double-quotes to necessarily mean that someone is being quoted verbatim. Most adults also use them to paraphrase, even to the point of intentional oversimplification in order to make a point.

You jumped my shit when I did it, and now you're whining about Maggie doing the same. Nobody else places the special distinction between single and double quotes that you do, so if you want to communicate with other English-speaking humans, you may as well put your own special grammatical rules aside.

Yes, it's kinda silly for me to even waste a post to say this, but apparently it bears repeating.

Now take your bally and go home.

[hermit22]

I'm actually on X's side on the quotes thing, though. Paraphrasing is usually not quoted; putting quotes around it is misrepresenting someone's words. Maybe we need to establish some sort of standard like that around here? It may seem ridiculous, but in order to communicate, you must speak in the language of your audience.

[MaggieL]

Quotes are used to delimit ironic usage and paraphrase as well. This is what causes people to make little "quote mark" gestures in the air when speaking. Almost always when quoting an actual posting here--especially an entire sentence or more, but even a short phrase when responding to it--I'll use the vB quote markup, unless I want to use a phrase of a few words embedded in a sentence. In an email based forum I'd be using the typical > quoting for quoting another post and conventional quotemarks in rhetoric.

As for single vs. double quotes, I only use them for nested quotes in prose; starting with double quotes on the outermost level.

Some people here make a real fetish of "ad hominem" without apparently understanding the term. Every time a position is deprecated is not an "ad hominem". And it's just amazing how some of the the folks who lead off with outraged an accusation that they've been attacked "ad hominem", and then follow right on with the most amazing abuse that shoots right past being an "ad hominem" into being a direct personal attack.

That said, I will myself indeed use the "ad hominem tu quoque" form when someone takes a position inconsistant with something they've said earlier or elsewhere in another thread. Tough.

Chefranden, what makes someone evil is not their disagreeing with me. The Jihadists can sit in their homeland and disagree with me until the Sun burns out for all I care. What makes them evil is annoucing their intention to impose thier religion on my people, and kill me in the process, and then beginning to prosecute their campaign.

Self-defense doesn't always happen over a timespan of minutes, hours, days or even months. When someone has declared their intent to kill you, has the apparent means, and has already executed several successful attacks, what possible obligation could you be under to allow them to continue unless you reach them in hot pursuit?

There *is* no hot pursuit of a suicide bomber.

[Tobiasly]

Here is what Maggie typed:

before you to begin to develop a genuine moral compass that rises above the kindergarden level of "fighting is bad" and "two wrongs don't make a right".

I think it is painfully obvious that she wasn't actually attempting to attribute the phrase "fighting is bad" as something that X said word for word.

I think that it is an obvious oversimplification in order to make a point. It's as if to say, "this is what your argument boils down to for me." (Whoops, I used double quotes.. no, I'm not implying that Maggie typed those words.)

Now, let's try it without the quotation marks:

before you to begin to develop a genuine moral compass that rises above the kindergarden level of fighting is bad and two wrongs don't make a right.

Wow, that's pretty darn unreadable.

I might possibly begin to understand why some see the use of quotes there as incorrect, but X went as far as to say that I should have known, from examining all of his previous posts, that <I>single</I> quotes meant intentional paraphrasing, while <I>double</I> quotes meant literal repeating.

That's the distinction I was referring to, and I believe you'd be hard pressed to find many people who attribute the same connotation to them.

[wolf]

not that i'm any kind of an expert ...

but i always thought that single quotes were used to mark a quotation occurring within another quotation ... you know, kind of like curly-brackets, square-brackets, parentheses ...

[MaggieL]

Well, I'm not going to waste any more thought or words on how I use quotation marks. Certainly not in attempt to humor X, who's so outraged at my characterizing a certain view as "kindergarden level" that he's thrown a tantrum and is now sulking.

Earlier in this thread I alluded to children throwing tantrums to get what they want. Once the tantrum is thrown "reasonable compromise" becomes positive reinforcemnent for tantrum throwing...no mattter what scale it's done on. You guys on the neopacifist tag-team can go chase after him if you like.

[elSicomoro]

What seems to be weaving itself through this thread is a severe case of "I must be right" along with some barbs thrown in for added fun.

Griff, we're gonna put you in the running for either the official sage of the Cellar...or the official kiss-ass.

[Griff]

You make the call. As always, you are right on the money Warren.