Subject: Re: With friends like Erik, c.l.l doesn't need enemies
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/09/20
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3146818456668748@naggum.no>

* Raffael Cavallaro
| [deletia]

  you once wrote that you only responded to what I had done, and that you
  weren't to blame for anything you were doing.  I didn't have that excuse
  since I had started a new thread, in your opinion.  you also suggested
  that I stick to Lisp in comp.lang.lisp, but you didn't have to, because
  of the license to post irrelevant drivel in response to things you found
  offensive.  I suggest you start taking your own advice, and just shut up.

  as for your ability to read things into other people's posts, your
  "frankly racist" in response to the fact that the context in which people
  normally speak do not include starving and oppressed people in the third
  world, was sufficient to tell me that you are quite fanatical and should
  be ignored.  insofar as you continue to attack me, I respond only to show
  that you are off mark.  I don't discuss your insane conclusions, and I
  have no interest in talking with you at all.  confine yourself to what
  _you_ experience, what _you_ feel, and state _your_ assumptions and
  reactions, and I don't have to say anything.  as long as you elevate your
  fanatical idiocy to universality, you have to be shot down, every time.

  and since you sign off with your degree, I must assume that it is
  relevant to why you have to engage in these face-saving exercises where
  the other guy must be blamed for everything offensive in the world.  I
  have seen your kind a lot, Raffael Cavallaro, and since the stuff I'm
  being accused of are mutually exclusive, and always the very obvious
  "enemy" of whoever is attacking me, such as being a traitor to the white
  race when I attack racist idiots, a racist when I don't agree that the
  white race is responsible for every ill in the world or I embrace every
  race except that I ignore the third world when discussing most topics, a
  capitalist pig because I'm not joining the working class, a dangerous
  communist when I express my disdain for certain parts of society that
  some people think only communists can attack, etc.  common to all you
  insane fanatics is that I trigger your hate response, not for anything I
  do, but for something you need to express your hatred of and which you
  find evidence of in just about anything.  like, the other day, I was
  accused of being a neo-nazi by one idiot who had read my web pages, and
  the next day, a neo-nazi said he'd kill me because I collaborate with
  Jews and communists and his favorite euphemisms for immigrants and
  homosexuals.

  you know what I think amidst all this hatred?  that it is very useful to
  learn how people don't think at all, but instead let their dysfunctional
  emotions lead them to extreme destructiveness.  if we know who those
  people are and we make them expose themselves, the world becomes a safer
  place for all.

  but what am I actually doing?  I refuse to believe most of the drivel
  that people take for granted -- instead I seek to understand how such
  views could crop up in the first place.  in so doing, I do in fact
  endanger their views and their beliefs, so there's no problem seeing why
  some people respond emotionally.  what's puzzling is that a Ph.D is
  unable to pull himself together and think.  what's puzzling is that
  fairly erudite people still protect their silly beliefs with emotional
  abandon and nothing else.  it's almost as if I catch people red-handed in
  the foul act of not thinking, and then they behave as most people do when
  caught in an act they would be very ashamed of admitting openly.  but
  such shame is counter-produtive in the extreme, and when it takes the
  shape of projection and false accusations against others to detract
  people's attention from the fact that Raffael Cavallaro is so fanatical
  that his credibility is exactly zero, it works only to destroy the sender
  of such incredible idiocy.

  finally, a small but important issue which keeps coming up with alarming
  frequency: those who attack me, do so for things I have not actually
  done, but they assume I would do, for things they could not know even if
  they were true, but necessarily must assume, and they attack me for
  holding views and attitudes for which there exists a plethora of evidence
  to the contrary.  it seems one-dimensional people have to attack me,
  because what I do is deny one-dimensional people the right to exist.
  and, yeah, of course, I get this "you see the world in black and white"
  all the time, because I refuse to see a particular issue in a gray that
  would allow others not to make up their mind.  I have come to conclude
  that one-dimensional people are completely unable to see the image for
  all the single-color dots in two-dimensional half-tone images.

  if you want me to accuse me of anything, accuse me of having no respect
  at all for one-dimensional people, but all you really have to do to
  create a new dimension in your life is to learn to be able to appreciate
  that context bounds meaning, that no context is wrong, and that only the
  act of assuming meaning outside context is wrong.

  put another way, especially for Raffael: try to read people to understand
  what they have meant, not what you would have meant had you used the same
  words.

#:Erik