Re: All hail Bob!

From: David Cressey <dcressey_at_verizon.net>
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 09:54:08 GMT
Message-ID: <4Z12g.1172$Cc.510@trndny07>

"Jay Dee" <ais01479_at_aeneas.net> wrote in message news:5fZ1g.11150$P2.2969_at_tornado.ohiordc.rr.com...

---

>
> What's the point of this oblique rant?
>
> While BB's blunt replies to and comments on other posts
> jolted me, I've come to feel that he has faced and embraced a
> worthwhile truth: being polite is sometimes a greater barrier
> to communication than being rude.
>

The question then becomes, how do you confront someone's ignorance without being rude to the person?

This is made more difficult by the fact that we have been trained to be ashamed of our own ignorance, while being light hearted about our own stupidity. Witness the proliferation of books "for Dummies" (a reference for the rest of us).

I'm one of us, but I'm not one of the rest of us (in that sense). I hope I share that with most of the readers in this group.

> If someone tells you that you're a rock-headed moron, you
> just might be. For some of those, the next obvious question is,
> "Do I want to stay that way?"
>

Or you might just be ignorant, which is not the same thing as "rock headed moron". The problem that people who know something often have is how to deal with the "invincibly ignorant" person.

What I would wish from someone like BB is that he could, by now, offer links to websites that develop the ideas in proper detail, and offer a positive alternative. I refuse to believe that no such websites exist, or that BB doesn't know of any of them.

In short, rudeness, by itself, accomplishes nothing. Received on Fri Apr 21 2006 - 04:54:08 CDT