Subject: Re: how does recursion work?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: 2000/10/17
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3180766532949865@naggum.net>

* Kenny Tilton <tilt@liii.com>
| where do you get off calling someone a liar because you disagree on the
| expansion of a function? and you pretend to be keeping this NG free of
| undesirables? not.

  Since you know about this, where do _you_ get off deciding that it
  was simple _disagreement_ that caused me (conditionally, which you
  also ignored in your typical zest to blame me for something I don't
  do) to "call him a liar"?  And has it occurred to you that someone
  is not a _liar_ simply because one has told a lie?  I don't describe
  people, Kenny, I describe actions.  You describe people, not actions.
  There's a word for your behavior: Undesirable.  If you are intent
  upon continuing regardless of feedback and suggestions and hints,
  _you_ may become undesirable, too, but it will probably take a long
  time before you figure out the crucial difference between the
  adjective and the noun "undesirable" the way you're heading, and I
  very much doubt that I can say anything that will cause you to think
  about anything at all, anymore, because you prioritize people before
  truth, and for people who do that, there's only one chance: they
  have to rearrange their priorities before there is any hope at all.

  By the way, what _is_ all this to you?  Why is it so important to
  make an asshole of yourself by constantly proving that you judge and
  comment on people when you should judge and comment on their actions?
  What's the point to all this, Kenny?  Do you think it's _right_ to
  judge people and not actions, perhaps?  That's so under-evolved and
  so disturbingly brutal an attitude to justice that I wonder if you
  would survive if anyone treated you like that.  Quit while you're
  alive and don't promulgate the idea that people aren't in control of
  their behavior, but must be branded and punished simply for being.
  It took mankind billions of unfairly lost lives to pay for the
  wisdom of the modern justice systems, yet we still have serious
  problems actually getting the message through to the population,
  especially with false group accusations like racism and the like,
  but if there is any hope for those living today, it is at least in
  the knowledge that the legal system isn't ruled by brutal mobs who
  lynch and kill people they don't like, regardless of what they did.

  The mark of your evolution into a human being will be that you can
  listen to the experience of and the truth explained by someone you
  don't happen to like personally.  You are not fully a human being if
  you disregard the truth if you believe that those who tell it are
  somehow incapable of truth and the same experiences that apply to
  you: That way lies the idea of sub-humans and group discrimination.
  Just exercise the intelligence you have and work hard at it if it
  doesn't come quickly to you, and you will grasp the idea that truth
  is independent of people, but has to be discovered by, propagated
  by, and held by people to work.  Otherwise, untruth wins by default.

  If I can keep your intellectually under-nourished attitudes at bay,
  Kenny, I can indeed pretend to keep this NG free of the undesirable
  that you (and some others) bring with them here.  But it's not why
  I'm here, just like I'm interested in this aspect of society because
  I have to live in one with people who similarly destructive as you,
  not because I want to spend any time on it.  Ideally, people would
  have parents and teachers who told them about justice and dispelled
  the notions that people _are_ bad because they _do_ bad.  Some
  people _do_ bad because they _are_ bad, but some good people do bad,
  too, and the unfairness of treating them as bad people is the best
  way to turn good people into bad people.  In fact, that's how the
  vast majority of bad people were created.  It is in all our personal
  interests to see to it that we create as few bad people as possible
  and that we identify the few really bad people that are out there.

#:Erik
-- 
  I agree with everything you say, but I would
  attack to death your right to say it.
				-- Tom Stoppard