No, he pointed out that only people who have no regard for the ability
of others to examine the truth of a statement, refer to private mail
in support of their public position.
| Who wants to deal with that kind of abuse just to share their feelings
| about CLIM?
The only abuse you see is of your own invention. As always, in fact.
A written text has no power to abuse you. It is a dead string of bits
that needs an interpreter before it has any meaning. That interpreter
is you, and you have to accept responsibility for your interpretation.
If you fail to do this, you will believe that other people said what
you interpreted it to mean, and it becomes impossible for anyone to
show you that you interpreted it wrongly. This is just like those UFO
sighting programs on Discovery Channel, where people claim that they
saw something and when somebody else points out that it was not what
they thought they saw, these interminabely retarded people claim that
scientists and skeptics deny what they saw. I mean, sensory evidence,
man! What are you going to trust? Your own eyes or some scientist
who wasn't even there?
| But it did kill a few months, as did training for a sporting event,
| which was a lot friendlier than c.l.l. now that I think about it.
Dude, comp.lang.lisp is a collection of texts. It has no capacity to
be friendly or hostile. There is simply not enough information here
to give rise to any such things. If you think you see it, it can only
be because you are willing to fill in all the blanks and flesh out an
impression with all sorts of extrapolations. This is not like people
who communicate in real life, with faces and voices and body language.
This is nothing more than sterile, dead words that come to life only
because you breathe life into them. If you look for friendliness, you
will breathe friendly life into them. If you look for hostility, you
will breathe hostile life into them. If you look for abusiveness, you
will breathe abusive life into them. If you look for humorous content
and are prepared to regard incongruities as funny, you will find a lot
of warm, intelligent humor here. If you are dead serious and lack a
sense of humor on your own, incongruities are insulting, harmful, and
in need of revengeful responses.
We had a lot of people here in the past who came to comp.lang.lisp
with their minds firmly set in their hostile expectations, who saw
every single utterance as evidence of hostility. In real life, people
who have this kind of mental disorder face a large number of strong
correctives via their non-verbal senses, but something is missing in
people who are unable to produce the same correctives on their own
from the texts that they read. Some people are /inept/ at producing
their own correctives and need other people who actually hold their
hands or shoulders and deliver the correctives through body heat.
Look at the word �corrective�, which some people respond to as if it
can only mean punishment through infliction of pain. A smile is a
corrective action when some person misreads a joke. A body hug is a
corrective action when some person misreads group acceptance rituals.
People who believe that correctives are painful were most probably
damaged by extremely harsh conditions during their formative years,
during which they never learned that correctives are never a statement
of personal like or dislike, but an expression of a desire for them to
improve. Those who deliver correctives through words on the Net, have
a right to expect that the recipient is able to process correctives in
an intelligent way. All kinds of information that contradicts beliefs
or previous statements have a core purpose of improving the state of
the public information, and this must always be regarded as good.
However, some people are broken. They probably never experienced that
accepting correctives led to better relations with other people, and
so they have come to believe that doing something harmful and stupid
on purpose is a good way of showing someone else that it is a harmful
and stupid thing to do, but this kind of �corrective� has never worked
in all of human history. It is the kind of retarded coping strategy
that people who never understood that if you do not care enough about
the improvement of someone you give a corrective to want to see it
through, you should refrain from delivering the corrective altogether.
In all likelihood, these people were damaged during their formative
years because they received correctives with no follow-up concern and
the only thing they ever learned was that they had done something bad
and wrong, which they could not process. Almost all the people who
have gone ballistic here and elsewhere on Usenet when they are told
that they are mistaken in one way or another, exhibit serious problems
in this regard, and they lack the focus on their self-improvement and
probably any other purpose that would mean they would appreciate the
correctives. Many of these people walk out into the great wide open
and speak only for a single person: They want others to like them, and
they say things that they believe will cause others to accept them as
members of their tribe. A corrective to such insufficient people will
be interpreted as rejection from the tribe, and if they think they had
deserved to be members of the tribe, they attack the tribe member that
has unfairely rejected them, while in reality, and as self-sufficient
people immediately observe, the corrective is a welcoming message to
the tribe. If, however, you have an emotional deficit and demand that
other people provide you with what you lack, you will necessarily find
that people who refuse to give you anything of what you so desperately
need, are hostile. If you have an emotional surplus, you do not need
other people to provide you with what you do not lack, and so you have
no need to engage in this practice with others, either.
The more we learn about the psychology of team-building, the more we
realize that people with a similar lack or similar surplus of self-
sufficiency are able to team up and work together, while teams where
people have wildy disparate self-sufficiency turn into cat fights and
exhibits of the constant need of those with a relative deficit of
self-sufficiency to prove their position relative to the other team
members, while those with a relative surplus of self-sufficiency want
nothing to do with those with a deficit because they get nothing back
from being around them. The best team-building methodology has been
found to be to help every team member increase his self-sufficiency to
the point where dependence on constant infusion of �respect� and the
like to cover the running deficit, vanishes completely. This is in
sharp contrast to the traditional belief that the best teams exhibit a
strong interdependency between team members, and it does not take much
thinking to realize that in such a system, if anyone starts to feel
that they have been more �giving� and others more �receiving�, they
will stop giving and start to be demanding, instead. In a team where
nobody is /needy/, however, the universal surplus means that nobody is
in a position to demand that others take care of them, and they can
focus on their stated purpose, as well as play and joke and take care
of anyone who should suffer a temporary loss. It is therefore vitally
important for a group of people who wish to cooperate over the long
haul to ensure that no one is allowed to exhibit an emotional deficit
that others are somehow obliged to make up for. Especially for such a
loosely coupled group as a newsgroup, where people communicate for but
a few hours a day, at best (or perhaps worst :), everybody needs to
make sure their emotional needs are satisfied before they venture out
into an environment that cannot have any duty to fulfill their needs.
In other words, Kenny, newsgroups are only as friendly as you decide
to make them with your own contributions. If you start to exhibit a
need for others to be friendly towards you, you will necessarily start
to believe that absence of friendliness is equivalent to presence of
hostility, just like a bunch of neurotics have done here in the past.
| Well, thanks for calling me a liar. My record here on c.l.l. totally
| justifies that. You CLIMers have really hit bottom. I hope!
Notice how I completely fail to care about your faux guilt trip.
--
Erik Naggum | Oslo, Norway 2004-031
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
