Peace,

     > In this context (Elizabethan english) I find it suprising that the=20
     > phrase God damn used. I could find no reference to the contraction=20
     > Goddamn at all.

     > As an example of this form of english, Shakespeare in the many=20
     > hundreds of thousands of words, makes only one reference to "God damn":

I know that `damn' ceased to be a taboo word some time around a
century ago, but when did it become one?  Before or after
Elizabethan times?

  There is one thing I do not understand about you people who take valuable
  time out of your important lives to quip about others being on topic or
  not.  On which newsgroup would it be on-topic to discuss whether others
  are on topic or not?  If you know the answer, you also know where to post
  your replies.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

"There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result."
Winston Churchill

In this case,

"Never murder a man when he's busy committing suicide."
Woodrow Wilson

or,

"Never stand between a dog and the hydrant."
John Peers

:)

Michael

People don't generally get thanked for being civil.  It's just expected of
people.

N.B.:  What passes for civil varies tremendously from society to society.
In Israel for example (I cite this only because I have personal experience
with it) a certain level of insulting, screaming, and yelling is
considered quite acceptable.  Americans are often quite shocked when they
experience this for the first time.

FWIW, Erik, I do notice that you are often civil to people.  I also notice
that you contribute vast quantities of high-quality technical content to
this newsgroup.  The volume and quality of your writing is astonishing,
and a little scary too.  I don't know if you realize how extraordinary you
are.  Very few people are capable of doing what you do.  (I'm considered a
pretty bright person among my peers, but I don't think I'm a fraction as
technically capable as you are.)

The fact that you are so smart makes it all the more annoying that you
don't realize how counterproductive some of your debating tactics can be.

(Pirelli Tires commercials)

  I expect civility beyond compare from people who demand it from me.
  If they have a "right" to become hostile and agressive because they see
  something they do not like, they actually validate in action what they
  criticize in words, but it is probably more annoying that they do not
  realize just how much they do this, because the misguided notion of
  feeling "justified" in their actions completely cloud their vision.

  I expect that people who post in public want dialogue, but the cretins
  want only condemnation.  I do not accept this.  I accept even less that
  these same guys come back to attack me even though I have done nothing
  whatsoever to /them/.  Furthermore, they are completely above reproach in
  their own eyes, and therefore have nothing whatsoever to offer anyone.
  The treatment I get at the hands of these cretins is so fucking annoying
  that I doubt that anyone else understands it.

| The fact that you are so smart makes it all the more annoying that you
| don't realize how counterproductive some of your debating tactics can be.

  What amazes me is that people who know statistics do not realize that
  they are more productive than not.  People come around, realize early on
  in an exchange that they have been criticized for something specific and
  for a reason.  More often than not, people get the idea pretty fast.  I
  keep track of this because it obviously matters a great deal to me, but
  those who only count the artillery rounds make the same mistake those who
  think Israel is at blame and the Palestinians are only victims do.  In
  any battle, the defensive force will appear stronger than the attacking
  force for the obvious reason that they must not only stop attackers, but
  ensure that they know that attacking has higher costs than benefits and
  if defeated once, will meet even harder defeat next time around.  If you
  are a naïve bystander, you will believe that the party that uses the most
  force is the agressor, but if you actually want to stop the attacks, you
  cannot fail to understand that the aggressor will /continue/ as long as
  he are not sufficiently discouraged.  For a truly large number of cretins
  and aggressors against me (and no amount of "defense" rhetoric will get
  anyone who has not been attacked in any way off the hook when he makes
  the first aggressive move towards me), this works wonderfully.  Many
  people are mortally afraid of engaging me in combat.  This is only good!
  Imagine the number of fucked-up basked cases who would waste everyone't
  time and disturb the peace if they were not discouarged.  However, some
  simply do not get it, just like so many Palestinians, probably because
  they have never spent the modicum of mental effort required to see that
  what they regard as attacks are /reactions/ to something quite definite.

  If random bystanders really wanted peace, they would acknowledge the
  /problem/ that is being reacted to and help fix it.  If they attack the
  party that is only defending itself, they make things much, much worse.
  So in the spirit of dialogue, why do the cretins not realize how counter-
  productive /their/ efforts are?  Can they actually show /one/ case where
  it has helped to attack the party who defends itself?  Why can they not
  understand that their attacks legitimatize defense reactions?  What could
  be so wrong with people that they attack and attack in a frenzy of moral
  indignation without understanding that their victim has a right to a
  rebuttal?  It is when they deny that right that things turn most ugly.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  Why are you then unable to behave towards me?

| One should, however, expect to be chided for roasing newbies alive, or
| asking people to commit suicide, etc.

  But not, apparently, disturbing the peace the way you do?  When you are
  criticized for that, you go mad.  Could you /please/ make a serious effort
  to understand that you have no right to behave the way you do no matter
  how offended you are?  That, in fact, your emotional response is not the
  topic of this newsgroup?  If you have such a problem with it, send mail.
  When you choose to flaunt your personal problems in public the way you
  do, you could not /possibly/ make anything better.  This is all the more
  true if you think I flaunt my personal problems with idiots in public, so
  you really have no excuse whatsoever for what /you/ do.  Accept that and
  we might have a useful starting point in a dialog.  If you unthinkingly
  assume the right to do what you do, you near-explicitly validate mine.
  This is the message that I receive, regardless of your words.  Understand
  this, and you should be able to choose an approach that actually works.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Be that as it may, might I suggest, if you really want to invoke
statistics, that you ought to do a control experiment: for a while, when
you feel you are being attacked (or when someone is acting like a cretin,
or whatever), just let it slide instead of attacking back, and see if the
net productivity (no pun intended) of that approach -- measured by
whatever metric you choose -- really is lower than what you're achieving
now.  You might be surprised.  Or maybe I'll be surprised, who knows?  I
submit it's worth a try.

* Erik Naggum
| What amazes me is that people who know statistics do not realize that
| they are more productive than not.

* Erann Gat
| That is a subjective assessment because it depends entirely on what your
| goals are.

  Look: Erann, I have only so much patience with you and I really thought
  you had started on a dialogue this time, but you have not.  /Your/ view
  is a subjective assessment if anything else is.  Your core
  misunderstanding is that your value judgments are nothing more than your
  personal view, but some absolute truth.  There is a strong element of
  /belief/ in your view that is quite irrational.  You have to understand
  how personal your position is before you can even approach me with such
  an argument.  If your views are The Truth (a comment you stupidly did not
  quite grasp), there is no value in listening to you.  /Real/ truth is not
  the conclusion, it is how you find it.  If you only give other people the
  end result, but refuse to show people how to get there, you are not of
  assistance.  Those who accept things on faith tend to behave this way.
  I regret to see that you are so unwilling to take part in the journey.

| You might be surprised.

  Why insult my intelligence so gravely after you fawned over it in another
  message?  It makes your attempts at compliments sound hollow and
  insincere, to put it mildly.  Consider for a moment that you might be
  wrong.  That would really be the day.  As long as you believe that only
  can be right, you have nothing to offer me or anyone.  Think about it.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Why do you go out of your way to manufacture disagreements between us?

  Yes, you do.  All the time.  You correct me when I post my observations.
  You override me when I want to show you my point of view.  I have reason
  to believe that you do not understand that you do this.  I wonder what it
  will take to make you understand.

* Erik Naggum
| Your core misunderstanding is that your value judgments are nothing more
| than your personal view, but some absolute truth.

* Erann Gat
| I presume that you meant to say that my core misunderstanding is that *I
| think* that my value judgements are nothing more than my personal views.
| But you are wrong.  I do not think that.  (And frankly, I'm getting a
| little tired of having you tell me what I think, particularly since you
| keep getting it wrong.)

  That was weakly phrased on my part, but I marvel at your ability to get
  confused.  Perhaps you should try to /listen/ to what I say and feel less
  of an urge to correct me all the time?

  You clearly believe that your personal value jugdments are more than your
  personal view, some absolute truth.  You show me this belief in your words
  all the time, but more your choice of words and what you choose to react
  to than the meaning they would have carried if they were trustworthy.
  You seem to confirm that your value judgments are more than your personal
  views in the above paragraph.  When my value jugdments are /invalidated/
  by you and you presume to know what the /correct/ value jugdments should
  be, my response is to tell you that you do not hold The Truth, or throw
  up my hands in exasperation and ridicule you for it, which you amazingly
  do not understand.

| I admitted the possibility that I might be wrong in the very next sentence
| (which you conveniently deleted).

  Your next sentence was "Or maybe I'll be surprised, who knows?" and that,
  with all due respect, is no admission of a possibility that you might be
  wrong.  Quite the contrary.  Your last sentence was "I submit it's worth
  a try" which shows that it was but a feeble-minded way to coach others to
  do your bidding by appearing to be receptive.

| Why do you go out of your way to manufacture disagreements between us?

  I am sorry to see that you perceive my insistence on showing you my view
  after you ignore it, correct it, and override it as if I were manufacturing
  disagreements.  The fact is that we disagree on many important things.
  You would see that if you tried to listen.  In my experience, you are not
  receptive to anything that would falsify or deny your own position.  You
  are more than happy to tell people what you think and how you see things,
  with a thinly guised notion of absolute truth behind it, which is not per
  se bad -- it can even be good -- but do you ever /listen/ to other people
  such that you actually change your mind about something?  (Before you
  come up with the expected retort, people accuse me of two things: Not
  budging if I think I am right, and not saying the same thing is right all
  the time.  The intelligent reader concludes that I listen and change my
  mind when I have good reason to do so.  The unintelligent reader
  concludes that I am unreasonable and cannot be trusted.)

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  This is your view.  It is wrong.

| Why is *your* emotional response the topic of this newsgroup?

  You attack me, you dumbfuck.  What do you expect?

| How is asking people to kill themselves the legitimate topic of
| comp.lang.lisp?

  How is context irrelevant in your life?

  I have come to conclude after many years of informal study, there are two
  kinds of people¹: Those who think, learn, speak contextually, and those
  who think, learn, speak absolutely.  There is no middle ground between
  these two kinds of people.  If you do not understand the importance of
  context in human learning, there is no evidence of it /anywhere/, and you
  approach other people's statements as either true or not true and you
  /accept/ them as replacements of other statements if they are true.  If
  you do understand the importance of context in human learning, it is
  /everywhere/, and you approach other people's statements as valid in
  context, and you expend some effort to understand the context in which it
  is valid, and judge that more than the surface "truth" of the statement.
  Thus a person of the absolute persuasion will only believe one thing at a
  time in a given area, while a person of the contextual persuasion will be
  able to believe many different things in different contexts, pending a
  unifying context.  When a person of the absolute persuasion reads the
  statements of a person of the contextual persuasion, they are usually
  unable to understand anything that goes on, and prefer the stupidest of
  all possible reactions: they count words.  If people use words from
  so-and-so list of words, they are knowledgeable, kind, gentle, etc, and
  if they use words from so-and-so list of words, they are idiots, mean,
  harsh, etc.  Conceptual, contextual understanding of human communication
  is unavailable to people of the absolute persuasion and they will ask
  out-of-context questions and harrass people for their choice of words
  completely regardless of anything that happened surrounding their use.

  Needless to say, I consider people of the absolute persuasion to be
  useless wastes of resources that could be better spent elsewhere and
  favor recycling of the wasted resources that did not achieve contextual
  understanding in its lifetime.  Others tend to think that it can be
  taught, but I see no evidence of success.  Children exhibit these traits
  long before they are able to verbalize their conceptualization process.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway