On Sun, 5 May 2002, J. van Baardwijk wrote: > IMHO, there is *nothing* that can excuse an inflammatory remark. If someone > starts making such remarks, it is a clear sign that he has lost the > argument but refuses to admit it.
I disagree for two reasons. 1) Often the inflammatory remark has nothing to do with the argument itself -- it's just a personal opinion. Yes it's bad manners, but the remark itself may be tangential to the argument. 2) And this is more important: what qualifies as an inflammatory remark will differ from person to person. Judging such things can by highly subjective. There's the obvious insult, e.g. "So-and-so's an idiot or a subspecies thereof." There's the reductio ad absurdum, e.g. "If you think A then you must also think B [B being incredibly stupid]." There's the cheap generalization, e.g. "Of course you'd think X because you're a Y," and so on. I'm sure we can find endless examples. If the receiver of the remark is thick-skinned and in a good humor, he might not even see the remark as inflammatory or particularly irritating. "Yeah, whatever," he thinks, and just doesn't care. Other people can be less tolerant and find fault with almost anything. Often these two traits coexist in the same person depending on how he feels, what time of day it is, the sensititivy of the particular subject, whether he got laid the night before <bg>, and so on. In short, we're all human beings. We're all fallible. We all have peeves and sore spots and histories, and even when our intentions are good we're occassionally going to &#$! up or even fall into a rut of &#$!ing up. Also, because different people have different tolerances for different styles of speech, I might be able to trade jibes with person A that person B would consider inflammatory. Because we're on a list the has gone on for a long time and I hope will continue to do so, we're going to see everybody's bad side from time to time. The only solution is to apologize, forgive, and forget. Lather, rinse, repeat. Of course, nobody *really* forgets. Nobody can stop himself from making judgements. But we can stop ourselves from airing the inappropriate ones, and we can apologize when we make someone mad. And that's really about all we can do...I'm becoming convinced that administrative tools like guidelines and "webs of shame" aren't of much use when it comes to healing rifts between people, which is what we need. Guidelines are useful for encouraging good behavior and for setting goals, but once the goal has been missed they're useless. Once that happens, the individuals just have to work it out between themselves. (Can you tell that I'm really, really trying to find a way to make that happen?) Marvin Long Austin, Texas "Never flay a live Episiarch." -- Galactic Proverbs 7563:34(j)
