[Dave] I come upon you standing over a child beating her unmercifully with a club. My moral intuition compels me to act to stop you. When I do, you turn the club towards me and shout, "You fucking bum I'm an intellectual, you have no moral authority to interfere with me unless you can mount an intellectual defense of your actions.
[Arlo] Marsha is a 'child' in your analogy? I'm not sure if that's patronizing (to Marsha) or insulting (to children). A more appropriate analogy would be if you came across two boxers duking it out, and decided the one you see as "male/academic" must naturally be the aggressor/bully to the one you see as "female/artist". Whatever you think of the vitriol being exchanged, so long as you imply Marsha is some sort of innocent 'victim' to big, bad DMB, you are trying to stand on water. Second, to understand the current state of the dialogue, you need to take a historical view and see that what you see as some sort of kneejerk aggression is built off years of unsuccessful attempts at reasonable dialogue. Third, even in condemning the vitriol, DMB's arguments and reasons are sound. Should he be a nicer guy? Should he swoon over 'Marsha the Artist' and ignore her atrocious "reasoning" and continual SOL-intellect baiting? Should Marsha be exempt from challenges to her 'posts', or because she plays the Buddhist-artist should we just smile and nod at every post she makes? In other words, after you've condemned DMB for bullying poor Marsha, what next? What about all the challenges and criticisms of her 'posts' brought by others? Do you levy any criticism at Marsha for her sloppy thinking, baiting tactics, and refusal to do more than post thinly-veiled "SOL = intellect" postings? Or conversely, rather than merely denouncing DMB's aggression, why don't you substantiate and support Marsha's 'arguments'? Lastly, if Marsha didn't want the attention, she could easily put DMB (and everyone else who thinks her thinking is sloppy and ugly) on ignore. Heck, she could even write a filter that scanned for "DMB" and immediately trash any email with his name on it. Or she could actually respond to arguments about her 'statements', rather than sliding back to variations of 'who cares what you think, na na na na na". If anything, DMB's posts give Marsha the opportunity to pretend she's Lila, and that's really all she wants to do. So let's put things into a bit of a larger perspective. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
