At 09:02 PM 9/14/2004 -0700 David Brin wrote:
>... But the [Afghanistan] war plan was utterly and completely
>Clinton's already in place and ready to go. This
>undisputable fact would be open knowledge if it
>weren't desperately urgent for the monsters to
>suppress it.
>
>Feh.
>
>I'm balanced & I got nothin' to prove to you.
No, you certainly don't have to prove anything to me. I will fully agree
with you there (and indeed have taken a similar position in response to
challenges I have received on mailing lists.) I think, however, that you
might want to seriously ask yourself if you have proved yourself to
*anyone*, though. That is, you might want to assess whether anyone
believes your claims of being "balanced."
In a thread a few months ago, Gautam proposed a simple test of your
"balance." He suggested that we compare the arguments you espoused on the
List to the arguments espoused by people who are generally accepted to be
"balanced" and those espoused by people who are generally accepted to be
"Democrat partisans" - and determine where the greater correlation lies.
I think we all know the answer to the conclusion from that test.
In the current thread, I have proposed an alternative test of your
"balance." I have suggested that we could examine your comments on this
List, look for mentions of Democrats and Republicans, and tally up the
positive and negative mentions. Again, I think we all know the answer to
the conclusion from that test.
Now granted, Gautam and I are two individuals who are perfectly honest
about the fact that we are more inclined (I probably quite a bit moreso
than Gautam) to agree with the Republicans on the issues of the day. Then
again, isn't that yet another datapoint? If your viewpoints espoused on
Brin-L were truly "balanced", wouldn't you be receiving equal amounts of
criticism on your supposed "balance" from Brin-L'ers inclined to agree with
Democrats as well as those inclined to agree with Republicans? But
anyhow, I digress from my point.
At any rate, it seems clear that you keep repeating the claim that you are
"balanced" because you value the quality of being "balanced" as being
important. Moreover, it also seems to me that you place value on being
perceived by others as being "balanced" - which would again explain why you
keep making that assertion and providing certain datapoints of evidence to
support that assertion. Thus, while you certainly have nothing to prove
to me (I think its well established that we are going to tend to disagree
more often than not on the issues of the day), I think that you might want
to well consider if you are leaving the impression of being "balanced"
among those who read your writings on this List. If the tests proposed by
Gautam and I are any indication - and I think that those tests are quite
reasonable - then the answer is probably not. Based on such assessments,
I am sure that you can imagine how frequent assertions of "balance" in
spite of the evidence must appear, and I can only hope that will give you
pause to either reassess your claims of "balance" or else your underlying
rhetoric on this List that forms the foundations of those tests. Again,
you surely have nothing to prove to me - but it might well be worth it for
you to consider if you are successfully proving anything to anyone.
JDG
_______________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world,
it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03
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