Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 19:40:24 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass) Cc: nbm@mithrandr.moria.org (Neil Blakey-Milner), rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Brett "attacks" Message-ID: <200101191940.MAA13791@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010119092259.048d6100@localhost> from "Brett Glass" at Jan 19, 2001 09:24:39 AM
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> >Part of many groups, is the person who never realises that people in the > >group really don't approve of his behaviour, and _really_ don't agree > >with his rhetoric, despite his numerous anonymous referrals to people > >who do..... > > And here starts another attack in which the poster attempts to brand > the subject of the pile-on as socially dysfunctional and delusional. Technically, it's an analysis, not an attack, even if you disagree with it. It does brand you as disfunctional, in the context of the FreeBSD social organization, but, in fact, as you must admit, it's true that you do not function as a member of that society in a way that the society would have you function. That's not a criticism, and it's not a bad thing to be so branded, in my opinion. People forget their heros and cannonize their misfits, when histories are written. IMO, the "and delusional" part was you using the jingoistic technique of "tarring with the same brush", also called "guilt by association" or "sympathetic magic". Also IMO, the parting shot you made was accusatory, and really uncalled for in context, unless it was intended as a rhetorical technique to ensure that only the "heavies" stayed involved in the dialogue; in any case, it's really not a success strategy: it made you appear unnecessarily spiteful. The point is that any society is based on economic principles; even forests or coral reefs are based on economies, even if you can't see them without years of study. Any society will require that you pay in the coin of the realm for what you propose to expend in the way of its resources. I suggest you find something the society values, and offer it as a "package deal", along with the other stuff which it doesn't value (even if you think it should, or even if you are proven epistimologically correct, and there is a quintisenntial and elemental value to the other stuff that it truly _should_ value as a matter of enlightened self-interest). Or to put it another way, in the words of an immortal, if currently (and wrongly, IMO) underappreciated, philosopher: "A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down" Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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