Re: Look!!! He's acting a bit 'weird'!

On 8 Jun, 16:54, nigel <use...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
x-no-archive: yes

of mice and monkfish wrote:





On 8 Jun, 11:53, nigel <use...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

x-no-archive: yes

of mice and monkfish wrote:

If you wish a poster would clear off, as far as i'm concerned, you
are
entitled to your opinion, and you are entitled to express it - but
that doesn't mean i agree with it, or that your opinion is 'right' or
morally acceptable.

Go back and re-read it for yourself.  It's right there in black and
white.  I don't know how i can state my position any more clearly than
that.

See if I've got this right - you believe in freedom of speech, but if
someone expresses a different opinion to yours, you can challenge them
and call them names?

Calling someone who has put forward an inconsistent, untenable
position a 'hypocrite' is not calling someone names.

I believe in the principle of freedom of speech, but there is a
responsibility on the speaker not to put their own needs or beliefs
above all others.



Therefore, the right to the freedom of speech would seem to be merely
hypothetical. If you actually /use/ it to say something unpopular,
something that disrupts the status quo (something that, for example,
puts one man's need for truth and justice before the cosy arrangement
the rest of his society has come to), then you are being 'anti-
social', and should be first told - and then /made/ - to shut up.

The importance of freedom of speech is to leave individuals free to
criticize their society, or the-powers-that-be (for example), without
fear of recrimination.



You call me a hypocrite, yet I freely admit I moderate various
newsgroups - that means I suppress spammers. Yes, I suppress 'free
speech'. I think my position is consistent.



You're a hypocrite because you claim to support free speech, and yet,
by your own admission, actively suppress it.




At last you seem to see some of the weaknesses in your analogy.

I was describing certain trends i saw, and exaggerating them to make
them evident.  I didn't mean it literally.  In that respect, all
anaolgies are 'weak'.

A better one might be to regard this as a group of dentists. sgates has
come in here with a broken leg and is screaming his head off. I want him
to go to A&E to get help. You want him to stay so you can hug him,
without treating the source of his pain. And all the time, nervous
patients who want help with dental problems are turning away because of
all the screaming.

That's a really poor analogy, for all sorts of reasons.

It's certainly not ideal.

For one
thing, you say this is a group of dentists, then you start talking
about patients.  Who are the patients and who are the dentists?  Are
you a dentist, or a patient?

The people who suffer depression are both patients and dentists - they
are suffering and yet they have knowledge and experience that can help
other patients. I'm not a patient or a dentist, more like a hospital
visitor.

Also, the conclusions you draw from this weak analogy are not even
consistent.  Say someone fell over and outside the dentist and twisted
his ankle and is taken into the waiting room so he can sit down and
take some time to recover.  Would you say that it would be totally
unacceptable for the dentist to sit the chap down and try to make him
as comfortable as possible, to give him ice for his ankle and a chair
to sit down on?

That's an extremely weak argument. sgates is screaming his head off and
making zillions of posts here isn't going to help him.



But all it takes to ignore him is to add him to your killfile. Bingo
- problem solved! And everyone gets to keep their human rights.

And killfiling someone doesn't have to be done disrespectfully. You
can killfile someone and say, "I don't agree with what you're saying,
and i don't like it, but i respect implicitly your right to say it".
I heard very little of that sort of respect given to SG. And i think
he deserves that respect, and i am prepared to fight for it on his
behalf.



Moreover, lots of other people here have other, non-depression-related
problems.  We have people with OCD, we have alcoholics, we have people
with broken hearts, we have hypomanics, we have BPDs, we have
aspergics, in the past we had a regular poster who was a paranoid
schizophrenic, and another chap who was blind, we have someone here at
present with Korsakoff's syndrome, we have people who can't find a bra
that fits, Peter Clark was dying from cancer, we've had people talking
about news servers and computer problems, we've recently had a thread
about ordering coffee at starbucks and using the train.  Now,
according to you, none of these subjects should be allowed to be
brought up, either, since they are not depression, and we do not have
the necessary 'expertise' to help these people.

I didn't say that. Please don't make things up to support a weak argument.



In that case, it must have been another evil nigel who suggested that,
since SG does not have depression, his posts are not 'appropriate' for
this particular forum. This other one even used the word
'appropriate', and said that SG's non-depression problem is not a
suitable topic for this group.

How many evil nigels have we got here anyway?

Here is what the other one said:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk.people.support.depression/msg/3de8260cc401b35c?hl=en




This newsgroup is here to support people suffering from depression.
General discussion is an accepted part of that. How has sgates involved
himself in general discussion?



That's my point - he's not hurting anyone. He's annoying one or two
people, but he's not actually hurting anyone. If i were a moderator,
i would've canned Rowland's ass because he was making hurtful
accusations against the other posters here, he was replying to other
people's posts, getting in people's faces, trying to provoke them a
lot of the time, trying to bully them, trying to hurt them. What we
see from S. Gates is completely different. He keeps himself to
himself. He doesn't hurt anyone, he doesn't involve any of the others
here in his 'thing' beyond posting on here.

If he annoys you, don't read him. But just because someone annoys you
does not mean their right to free speech should be suppressed through
bully-boy mob tactics. Hence my comments about the 'angry villagers'.


So you regard sgates as part of the we?

You mean someone, a human being, suffering from acute mental distress
and not knowing what to do about it?  Yes.

So sgates also has the responsibility of your 'we' to take into
consideration of the feelings of others and offer support. How is he
doing that?



Because the rest of us have some experience of mental distress, we
know that, when someone is suffering, they are not always dazzling
conversationalists. And we show them the appropriate consideration.
We show a little compassion.

Part of the ethos of this group - as i understand it - is that /
everyone/ deserves sympathy and support, regardless of whether they
pay taxes or not, of whether they have depression or any other
'condition' - and regardless of the help and support they happen to
give themselves.

The help and support we offer is not like a savings account where you
can only withdraw what you put in. That is fundamental to how this
group works, it comes before everything else.

The only other person - apart from you - who doesn't subscribe to this
basic tenet is John Doh.


It goes without saying that he needs help that we cannot give - that
is in fact true for everyone here.  Can you heal BTN's broken heart?
No - so why don't you tell him to take is some place else?  Can you
help Moondog go into a cafe and order a latté?  No?  Well, according
to you he has no business bringing it up here.

I have never said that. Stop making things up to support a weak argument.



That must have been the other nigel we have here.

Here is what this other chap said:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk.people.support.depression/msg/da794e8e455f7cbd?hl=en

I draw your attention to the bit where he expresses the 'wish' he has
that:


the poster would post elsewhere
where people would understand and support him, rather than here where
most people don't understand him and don't know how to support him



BTW - it's ironic that you should say "i never said that" when you
snipped out of a previous post the most important part of what i had
to say, and then went on to completely misrepresent my position on the
basis of this edited version you quoted. Isn't that odd? : )



Moreover, i'm not so sure that taking his meds will help.  I have a
certain amount of distrust in the psychiatric establishment, and do
not presume to say definitively what's best for someone in such a
situation, because i just don't know.

Apparently he posted here before, then went quiet. His own postings seem
to confirm that he stopped taking his meds. Presumably the meds helped
to control his condition such that he didn't need to shout all the time.



This is the reason why i'm raising these issues. You're not bothered
about his well-being. You just want him to be quiet and well-behaved,
to stop kicking up such a fuss. You would like to think they are the
same thing, but they're not. They're really, really, really not.
That's the flawed premise in your argument. Meds can suppress
psychotic episodes, and that is precisely why they are so popular
amongst pdocs. But that does not mean that they are best for the
patient. The side-effects are often worse than the original problem -
that's why there are such compliance issues. But anti-psychotics
continue to be prescribed in order to control 'problem' behaviour.

Have a look at this:

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/chemical_cosh/

It's exactly this sort of rationale, incidentally, that led to
political dissidents in the Soviet Union being confined in mental
hospitals and dosed up on the same sorts of drugs you think SG needs
so badly.

The point is not to help them, but to make them stop rocking boat and
saying things that the people in power found objectionable.

To go back to the angry villagers, there are different forms of power
- there is the bureaucratic power that a psychiatrist can unleash with
the stroke of his pen, then there is the blunt force power an angry
mob has. Regardless of its origin, whenever power is abused, the
result is always violence, whether it is a Soviet shrink giving a
political dissident anti-psychotics, or a mob in america's deep south
lynching a black man for sleeping with a white girl.



What we're doing for S. Gates is the same that we're doing for
everyone else here - we're keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for
the best.

What, no advice on how to get his pdoc to keep an appointment?



Maybe if his pdoc did keep an appointment it still wouldn't make any
difference. That's my fear, in any case, and that is very often the
case. There are no easy answers. You should realize that by now


monkfish


Evil Nigel
.

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