Re: THe OverRelational Manifesto (ORM)

From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 13:29:34 GMT
Message-ID: <21M1g.62885$VV4.1177445@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>

Marshall Spight wrote:
> 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.

Given the enormous volume of gibberish the idiots post, what makes you think anyone is going to read either position with enough care and attention to understand your argument?

Have you considered as well that you will be tempted to cherry pick from among their posts the ones that come closest to expressing anything cogent?

By doing so, you only help them achieve their goal of self-aggrandizement. The poor lurker who is just starting to learn this material will get the impression that the reams and reams of diarrheic horseshit posted by these ignorants contain something of merit. The poor lurker may mistake these phoney charlatans as your peers.

> 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.

My natural constituency are those who will initially dismiss me for style and then shock themselves into really thinking about things when they see me interact with someone who isn't selling snake oil.

>>>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 Bob Hairgrove 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.

You questioned his legitimacy as a poster for making a perfectly valid observation about the argument (or lack thereof) given.

Your post was anti-empirical. You questioned his legitimacy claiming that some willful ignorant had established her legitimacy. In reality, Bob Hairgrove established his legitimacy years before either you or the self-aggrandizing ignorant ever showed up.

Since you and she showed up, what decent content is in this newsgroup has been drowned out by a torrential slurry of diarrheic nonsense spewed forth by the self-aggrandizing ignorant whose 'legitimacy' you defended and by three or four similar ignorants.

By resorting to such obvious anti-empiricism, you impeached your position and exposed the moral, intellectual and ethical bankruptcy of same.

It's a free world. The self-aggrandizing ignorants can post diarrheic nonsense if they want. I can point out to the world what the diarrheic nonsense means: they are nothing more than a self-aggrandizing ignorants.

> He stopped, and I have not said anything negative about him
> since then.

Only Bob could tell us if you had any bearing on that or whether he simply has not encountered another situation to make him draw a similar conclusion.

> 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.

Why would I give a flying fuck whether you welcome me? Really. I find your welcome or your rejection insignificant and irrelevant.

>>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.

Actually, I do. Very much. I know and admire more than one such individual. I have the honesty and maturity to interact with such people very effectively.

> 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.

Well, I guess that's the end of your thesis, isn't it?

> 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.

Speak for yourself.

> I remember now. His name was Costin Cozianu.
>
> How did you feel about him, Bob?

I found him anti-empirical and saw serious flaws in his arguments that you must have missed. Received on Thu Apr 20 2006 - 08:29:34 CDT