Re: Flamewar _ DO NOT READ

On May 24, 6:46 pm, valis <campb...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
I know that replying to this is going to perpetuate this thread.

Then why do so?

Forgive me, r.g.r.a.

No.

I know that Neo will reply thinking that my responses below are
insults, deleting my text. The nature of my daily work compels me
regardless.

It compels you to harass and smear people on the internet? If so, I
suggest you quit, and then report on your boss somewhere. Most likely,
requiring you to behave like an ass on usenet is not something they
can legally do. So perhaps you should just refuse to do so, and if you
get fired you'll have grounds to sue for wrongful termination.

Forgive me.

No.

I would say that I don't intend any of these things to be nasty or
insulting.

Of course you would. Propaganda is more effective if you dress it up
to look sincere, or as if backed by expertise of some sort, or both.
But it still gives off the distinct odor of horse ***.

I'm just trying to share knowledge that may indicate to Neo
why people respond the way they do (for instance, [implies
that I'm a liar]

No, you're the liar.

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

(And the insults begin, right on cue. :P)

"People" don't respond "the way they do". You and one or two other
people here respond with knee-jerk abuse to seeing posts by me, and
furthermore take random potshots at me even when I'm merely lurking,
apparently because you are obsessive and psychopathic and have for
some reason developed a fixation on me.

Of course, my behavior is different. First of all nothing proves me
wrong, and secondly I don't tend to insult anyone here.

[strangely pointless text deleted]

....

I am of course
never shown a reason why I cannot be right, because no such reason can
exist, and when someone makes false accusations against me I *never*
ignore them.

The above says no reason can exist why you (neo) can't be right. i.e.
the very idea that you are wrong is impossible.

Of course. If I know something I know it, and if I don't I am not the
type to lie and pretend otherwise.

Do you really believe that it's not possible that you can be right?

Of course not. What kind of a stupid question is that?

[implied insults deleted]

No, you're the crazy one (see above re: obsessive tendencies).

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

[more amateur psychoanalysis deleted]

Useless. Even an actually qualified expert is incapable of rendering
any kind of sensible diagnosis from thousands of miles away based only
on a few snippets of text -- and a self-selecting sample, at that --
so *you* *certainly* can't.

But you're not really trying to, are you? No, your real intent is, as
usual, to saturation-bomb the population with anti-Neo propaganda, and
dressing up the propaganda to look like something more credible than
what it really is may make it more effective.

What it really is being a public hate letter from a sad and miserable
excuse for a human being, of course.

[assorted insults and schizophrenia deleted]

Propaganda is more effective if not riddled with glaring
inconsistencies, such as calling me "worthless" in the insults snipped
above and then following up promptly with:

Their interior nature is of course not worthless.

Of course, postings written in anger (or psychopathic hatred, even)
are likely to be at least *somewhat* incoherent. Posting only while in
a calm and unemotional frame of mind would seem to be good advice. So
would not posting off-topic inflammatory propaganda whose sole purpose
is to harass and threaten an innocent man, for that matter.

[insults deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

I also don't refuse to do research, except where I'd be
doing someone else's research for them that they lazily refused to do
themselves. I do sometimes *not do research*, but that's different
from *refusing to*; people sometimes seem to want me to have done some
research, but for some reason they'd failed to actually communicate
this in advance. People also sometimes lazily reference things without
actually including a URL, which I can't follow up without wastefully
duplicating work the poster must have already done in the past.

[insults deleted]

No. You are the one whose thinking is broken.

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

It is a thinking error for anyone on Usenet to assume that you should
or should not do something.

From your point of view, perhaps; sociopaths like you are not big
believers in law and order or in common human decency, after all. But
you certainly don't speak for the rest of the world. Most people are
aware of and accept certain norms for their behavior and that of
others, ranging from politeness norms to legal rules that are actually
enforced to some extent.

[insult deleted]

No. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

We just must accept what is.

Fatalism tends to live up to its name. I suggest finding a different
philosophy.

On the other hand, maybe you should stick with your current philosophy
but actually live up to its ideals. Start with accepting that I exist,
and am harmless, and have as much right to be here as you do in this
*unmoderated* group, and that you're far better off by leaving me
alone than by deliberately and without provocation attacking me with
long diatribes intended to ruin my reputation and harass me.

This type of "should" thinking is [insult deleted]

No. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

Not being a fatalist is not an error. It may be that you don't agree
with non-fatalist philosophies, but that's just your *opinion*. It
does not make those who disagree with your philosophy wrong, and it
certainly doesn't justify viciously assaulting them, so stop it at
once.

That's in common with me, but I have a good reason: I never do start
an argument. I'm not the type to post out of the blue and call someone
else names without provocation. You might want to look in the mirror
there, buddy, and at Valis. This thread was quite civil right up until
Valis responded to George's innocuous "Who's Neo?" with a verbose rant
chock-full of unprovoked hostility directed against me. And with posts
like this one I'm replying to, you sure as hell aren't helping.

You've spent years provoking that kind of response.

A lie. I've done nothing of the sort. The only times my posts are ever
uncivil is in response to an uncivil post, so it's always someone
else's fault when uncivil posts erupt. And often my response is still
civil -- though it may firmly and without ambiguity *disagree* with
the uncivil post to which it's a reply. That, of course, is not me
being uncivil; it is merely me correcting your mistake. If you don't
like being corrected by me, stop pontificating on subject matters
(such as the subject of Neo) that you aren't qualified to discuss
intelligently.

You don't have to do anything *today* to provoke something.

Nonsense. I certainly have to do something *today* to provoke
something *today*. My merely posting and saying "I got a dwarf priest
to OoD in under ten minutes" cannot reasonably be considered to
provoke anything hostile, regardless of the authorship of that post.

My having lurked for some threshold amount of time *certainly* cannot
reasonably be considered to be any kind of provocation whatsoever.

Someone *else* asking who Neo is or otherwise mentioning me likewise
cannot reasonably be considered to be *me* provoking anything, simply
because I wasn't the one that did the allegedly-provocative act.

You posting something about me out of the blue, to which someone
responds with "who's Neo?" and all hell then breaks loose, is of
course *you* provoking something.

I suppose you'll ask to be forgiven for that, too, now. Pre-emptively,
my answer is no, though I can't speak for anyone else here of course.

Sure. You and Valis shut up about me and this will all blow over
almost immediately thereafter.

The thing is, [insults deleted]

No. None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

your choices and thoughts will *not* blow over.

Irrelevant. We're not talking about my choices and thoughts. We're
talking about you and Martin Bazley posting hostile, unwarranted
attack posts to a public newsgroup one week seemingly out of some
spontaneous desire to be ***-disturbers.

Well, if you wanted to raise a stink, I daresay you succeeded. Just
don't complain when you don't come out smelling like roses after it's
over.

Or are you now suggesting that you honestly believe that you can *hear
my thoughts from afar*, and one of them a few days ago when I was
still lurking is what provoked you? If so, I suggest that you seek
immediate professional help.

In addition to this, Usenet is a relatively static permanent archive
of your writing and text.

Yours, too, so I'd be getting worried if I were you. What do you want
that record to show, that you spent most of your time writing useful
and on-topic posts or that you spent most of your time writing useless
flames and engaging in unproductive mud-slinging?

[nonsense snipped] your responses which IMHO don't really help

You're lying, of course. The very fact that you, apparently intent on
destroying me, now try to get me to believe that I'm pursuing the
wrong strategy is a strong sign that I am in fact pursuing the correct
one and that my doing so is annoying the hell out of you.

Good.

Writing how things are untrue does not stop anyone from thinking them.
Clearly it does not stop anyone from writing them. All it does, is,
well, nothing.

Clearly, you completely misunderstand the purpose of counter-
propaganda, or more likely you're pretending not to understand.

Let me spell it out for you. It's been known since the forties that if
you repeat a lie loudly enough and often enough, some fraction of your
audience will start to believe it more or less by reflex, even in the
presence of the occasional contradictory message or even contradictory
evidence. Even perceptions become altered; this sort of pressure to
conform to what others are loudly repeating often has been
demonstrated to influence at least the perception of color, in one
experiment shifting the dividing line between blue and green in
someone's mind, albeit temporarily; the effects wore off when the
repeated claims about objects' colors quieted. Which meant that newly-
observed objects were perceived "normally" again, but the test
subjects still remembered some objects as being bluer (or greener)
than they really were.

Simply disproving propaganda in a single message somewhere, even with
ironclad evidence, therefore does not suffice to remove the threat or
undo the damage.

Counter-propaganda, on the other hand, means bombarding the same
target audience with a diametrically opposite message just as
frequently (or more) than the opposing propagandist emits *their*
message. For instance, replying to every separate item of propaganda
with a negatory counterclaim.

For instance, responding to insults in propaganda directed against a
single individual with "none of the nasty things that you have said or
implied about me are at all true".

The effects on perception and belief from sheer repetition of the two
opposing messages end up canceling out, and once again the audience
won't be convinced of anything without actual honest-to-God
*evidence*.

Which, of course, the antagonistic propagandist is really going to
find annoying. As, indeed, you seem to, to judge by your recent
behavior. It must be frustrating, having everything you try to do to
me neutralized quite quickly. Why you bother to continue even trying
remains a mystery that only your therapist might ever know the answer
to.
.

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