Re: THe OverRelational Manifesto (ORM)

Bob Badour wrote:
> Marshall Spight wrote:
>
> > This does not mean one cannot strongly refute others' ideas.
> > But the above words don't address ideas at all, do they? They
> > hypothesize qualities of the opposite speaker.
>
> When I use them, they are empirical observations. I don't know about
> when others use them.

They are not empircal observations about the people, because you can't observe the people. You can only observe their usenet posts. This is not sufficient to judge the individuals, but it is sufficient to judge the posts themselves. Commenting on the posts, the ideas therein, etc. is perfectly fair game, and I am among the harshest critics of the *ideas* of some of the people whom you most revile. In fact, I daresay I am a much more *effective* deterrent to the adoption of those ideas by third parties than you are, because my refutations are substantive and address the ideas themselves, whereas your refutations are dominated by ad hominem insults, which intelligent people do not find persuasive.

I will grant you that there is probably a class of person for whom the most convincing manner of argument is who yells the loudest or who insults the most unwaveringly, and that your methods are more likely to reach them than mine are. But I expect they are in short supply in this particular context, and I also expect they are not the sort of people whom you consider to be your natural constituency.

> > In fact, I believe the best way to raise the level of discourse
> > on this newsgroup would be for extended further reading. In
> > particular, I am thinking of Miss Manners. Once the basic
> > material is mastered, we could move on to the advanced
> > stuff, like transaction processing or type theory.
>
> If that is the case, why did you question [name deleted] legitimacy
> as a contributor here?

There was a while back an individual who was otherwise quite reasonable, who started to veer briefly into name calling. I dislike name calling, and I have said so on many occasions, said so then, and likely will say so again in the future, if by some strange chance people continue to call each other names even after I've asked them nicely not to.

He stopped, and I have not said anything negative about him since then. In fact, I welcome his presence. If *you* stopped name calling and started discussing, you know, database theory or something, I would welcome you as well.

> Sure, you and Vadim have fun doing math together. But otherwise, this
> newsgroup has sunk way below the depths it was already at before you
> arrived.

Sigh. Since you are fond of bringing up the fact that you first posted here before I first posted here, I thought I'd go look that up and see just when each event happened; they weren't that far apart, and anyway my first usenet post (in another group) was 19 years ago. So I got to reading the thread in c.d.t. that I first posted on, and damn if it wasn't
quite interesting. Certainly *much* more interesting than this thread.

Sigh.

Well, Bob, I have just one last idea for you, which I'm sure will be unpalatable, but there you are.

You are fond of asserting that it's fine for you to be insulting to people
if their ideas are unsound. Clearly you don't consider politeness mandatory, as I do. So I propose a thought experiment: what if there were a person who was smarter than either you or I, and also at the same time, better educated than either of us. Better able to discuss logic, type theory, formal methods, and relational aspects of same than either of us. And, at the same time, this person was horribly rude to people on occasion, when he thought their ideas were unsound. This would be a person who better embodied the Bob Badour ideal than even you. I propose that if your thesis about rudeness being okay was sound, then you would really like this person. However, if your thesis was not sound, and in fact rudeness is simply an unalloyed ill, a cancer in the side of civilization, then you'd find this person quite distasteful, because *my* idea, that rude people are always distasteful, is actually the correct one.

Wouldn't it be interesting if there was such a person, and we could see how you reacted to him? Yes, your reaction would be quite telling, I think. Oh, oh, wait, hang on, there *was* such a person who used to come here. Yes, and he was much better at formal methods, logic, etc. than either you or I. I remember now. His name was Costin Cozianu.

How did you feel about him, Bob?

Marshall Received on Thu Apr 20 2006 - 09:26:08 CEST