Subject: Re: Macro-writing in CL
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 16:44:51 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3201180287961785@naggum.net>

* "Biep @ http://www.biep.org/" <reply-via@my-web-site.com>
> If you could, I could give you some hints on reading, like the fact that there
> is a semantics phase between input syntax and reply syntax.
> I really hope one day you will get to the level that you can read and understand
> what I wrote, and see that you are not addressing at all what I am talking
> about.

  I believe in the reciprocality of advice.  This means that advice that
  obviously only work one way ("you should" and "I should" are dissimilar)
  are completely devoid of meaning and are instead pure acts of aggression.

  You have shown me that you do not listen to what anybody else writes at
  all.  This means that "read and understand what I wrote" means only one
  thing: "agree with me".  This is probably also why you also believe that
  disagreement has anything to do with the criticism you receive.

  Now, please tell me, in simple words that you think I can understand,
  what are you posting here in order to achieve?  What is your goal?  When
  would you be satisfied to have achieved that goal?  Is there a measure of
  partial success?  Of incremental improvement towards any goal?

  From what I read of your posts, you are here to defend your own _person_.
  It is not your _ideas_ that you defend, it is _your_ ideas.  That is not
  a very healthy premise to hold when you start posting to USENET.  Ideas,
  both good and bad, get beaten up.  If you mix _yourself_ into all this,
  you get hurt.  Any ideas you post on USENET must of necessity be ideas
  that you can afford to see trashed, and not only ideas, anything you say
  at all _must_ be worth so little that anybody, anywhere can say whatever
  they want about it and it would not possibly affect your _person_.  This
  is usually easy, but some people turn out to be so personally involved in
  what they post that they feel as if they are under personal attack even
  when only what they have _said_ is under attack, if anything, and then it
  may turn pretty nasty, especially if they are the religiously motivated
  kind that want to expel "evil" and can do anything they want to fight it,
  including _much_ worse things than anybody ever did to them.  Something
  in the human psyche shows up in people whose ethics only work when they
  are treated _well_ by others: they go insane and become the most unethical
  people you can think of when they are "mistreated", a judgment call they
  make entirely on their own.  Fairweather ethics is useless.  Your _real_
  ethics is the one you reveal when you are angry, _really_ angry.  I think
  it is useless to talk about ethics among well-behaved people to begin
  with -- it is what we do when people are _not_ well-behaved (to us) that
  matters.  The kind of person who goes mad with rage and starts insulting
  people with ridiculously malplaced accusations that have _nothing_ to do
  with the topic at hand is but a curious, yet irrelevant, lunatic.

  For instance, anyone who tells others they cannot read probably have had
  a deeply personal relationship with reading disorders.  It was very bad
  for them, so it must hurt for others, too.  If people share the same
  problem, say suffering through the ambarrassments of remedial reading in
  grade school, the feeling is immediate and an amotional response follows
  automatically.  However, if you try this to someone whose reading skills
  far exceed your own, who read better than most adults at age 4, who reads
  snd writes several different languages, who very seldom publishes spelling
  mistakes and who turns to a dictionary to _learn_ new words and to make
  sure they are understood correctly, it is only laughable evidence of a
  loser's pathetic attempt to make his opponent as bad as himself.  A bad
  reader who tries in vain to insult others by being worse than him, which
  would have been a very grave insult indeed, only reveals his own problem.
  I think this is amusing in the most obvious cases, like this one.  But I,
  too have hot spots.  _Very_ few people have figured out which they are,
  but "your ideas are bad/stupid/whatever" is _not_ among them, but I do
  think that those who cannot accept such trashing of their ideas in public
  should lock themselves in their private chambers and swallow the key.

  It may be that the concepts of "private" and "public" have deteriorated
  to the point where it no longer makes sense to talk about it at all, but
  I want to believe that there is still a distinction and that those who
  confuse the two are and will forever be _wrong_ in doing so.

  Using a phony identification on your USENET posts is not a good way to
  separate private and public, especially when you are so sensitive about
  private matters that you have gone out of your way to make it impossible
  to attach them to any real person, anyway.

#:Erik
-- 
  Travel is a meat thing.