WHAT IS THE HONORABLE RESPONSE?

Oh--I hope Set doesn't do that. We like him just as he is. And it could well be that he is at a stage in life where a dramatic personality makeover, such as would be necessary to take the advice, might well have serious repercussions.

and then there's always the chance "the girl" might be wrong.

I'm too much of a gentleman to suggest such a thing dys.

right.

the thing is that Swimpy and I know Set. We know it wouldn't take any kind of personality makeover - just a posting makeover.

The rest of us do not have your's and Swimpy's advantage.

How could I possibly discuss anything other that a posting personality.

Others could find this advice helpful, as well.

And you might be right Swimpy.

But don't forget that the "I" was thousand years ago in university and was a dangerously stressed young woman who was sent to a student counsellor after the original prescription to drink a glass of wine each day hadn't helped her to calm down.

Not a particularly common self diagnosis.



Which assumes that thinking that there was "no good reason" means that there was no good reason. Which is a risky assumption. There could very well be good reasons for becoming stressed in the artificial and strange environment of a university. And pressures of expectation such that leaving was out of the question. An inner feeling opposed to an outside influence.

Then I would expect that ehBeth would have answered the question quite differently. New environments can bring stress, but new experiences are necessary for growth. We walk that fine line every day of our lives, don't we?

Anaximandros, writing about 2,600 years ago wrote--

{quote]Homer was wrong to pray that strife might perish from the earth; fir if his prayer was granted, all things would pass away.[/quote]

And



And



It depends on what "growth" means I suppose.

I tend to think nothing has no reason. That the reaction of the young "I" had a reasonable explanation. The counsellor was a twerp. Too facile by far.

Ouspensky's " in search of the Miraculous" -- Quote
When one comes to realize the necessity not only for self-study and self-observation but also for work on ones self with the object of understanding one's self, the character of one's self-observation must change. One has so far studied the details of the work of the what one thinks the inner person is, trying only to register this or that phenomenon, to be an impartial witness. One has studied the work of the machinery of the inner self. Now one must begin to discover one's self, that is to say, to see, not separate details, not the work of small wheels and levers, but to see everything taken together as a whole--the whole of yourself such "as others" see you.
Perhaps, for this purpose we should learn to take, so to speak, 'mental pictures' of one's self at different moments of one's life and in different emotional states: and not photographs of details, but pictures of the whole as we see it at the time. In other words these pictures must contain simultaneously everything that one can see in one's self at a given moment. Emotions, moods, thoughts, sensations, postures, movements, tones of voice, facial expressions, and so on. If one succeeds in seizing deep emotional moments from these pictures of one's self, then, should very soon collect into a whole album of pictures of one's self which, taken together, will show you quite clearly what and who you are. But it is not so easy to learn how to take these pictures-photographs at the most interesting and characteristic moments, how to catch characteristic postures, characteristic facial expressions, characteristic emotions, and characteristic thoughts. But if you can succeed, from all this, one should be able to see that your usual conception of yourself, with which you have lived from year to year, is very far from the real reality.
Instead of the person you had supposed yourself to be, you will see quite another person. This 'other' person is the real you and at the same time not . The "other " person as other's might know you, and certainly not as you imagine yourself or as you appear in your actions, words, and so on' you know that there is a great deal that is unreal, invented, and artificial in this other you, whom other people know and you know yourself. You must learn to divide the real from the invented. And to begin self-observation and self-study it is necessary to divide oneself. A person must realize that they indeed consists of two persons.... The other is the real you, the real I, which appears in your life for only a very short time.

Assuming you don't have constipation.

...but "sleep" continues undisturbed.....

When people say things that I consider legitimately wrong (e.g. racist jokes) I will often say so. If I want to keep the relationship with the person I'll usually try to avoid letting my offense shine through and do so dispassionately or even jokingly in turn (going all serious in the middle of a joke can be jarring to them).

Something like: "Come on, that is just an awful joke! So wrong!"

But I often let small things slide, and it would sometimes have to be something I feel is legitimately wrong (not just offensive to me) or that is causing someone else offense (e.g. when someone in Costa Rica starts their racist nonsense about Nicaraguans in front of a Nicaraguan I'll never stay silent) for me to bother confronting people in off-line conversations.

In open forums, where conversation is asynchronous and open I am more willing to speak my mind about such things though but I try to follow the same principles when I do, and try to avoid letting emotions of anger or offense shine through. I am not always successful, of course and there's the rub. I'd love to have more discipline and emotional restraint, and sometimes if something is legitimately offensive or I'm upset I am not always able to so I find myself forgoing any response sometimes, or trying to wait till I am no longer upset to reply. Of course, that doesn't always work either.

Ya just gots to do the best you can with the personality you are dealt I guess, and I didn't come stacked with a lot of restraint and ****.

Oh, and I should also mention that a big thing that helped me improve my own online interactions was to stop hiding behind the pretext of not using ad hominems. I'd do something like say: "that is a ridiculous thing to say" and justify it to myself in that I hadn't directly attacked the member but having attacked the idea.

That's a noble thing to do and all but there are still a lot of different ways to attack an idea, some less offensive than others. That was predictably going to be insulting in some cases and it represented verbal aggression that I was trying to pretend wasn't there while still deriving satisfaction from it.

Sometimes in an argument it feels good to add a bit of an edge to it, but I try to take them out when I notice them and replace them with something less emotive. But that doesn't always work for me of course and sometimes I'll end up saying things that I'd rather have phrased differently when I re-read it. Hell, if I read my younger voice it makes me cringe, and reading even a recent post the next day can do that to me. So I try to leave less things that would make me cringe on a dispassionate re-read.

Edit: I'm reading Predictably Irrational right now, and interestingly one of its chapters (the one on arousal) is about how humans consistently underestimate the effect their emotions like anger have on their ratiocination. We all acknowledge that a hot head might be a bit different but we are ill equipped to really see just how much. The moral of that particular chapter is to try to avoid making decisions (and in my case on a2k, posts as well) while your emotions are running high.

Something which motivates me here is loyalty. If i consider someone a friend, i am very unlikely to want to criticize them publicly, and when people here have advised me to use the PM method, i am very tempted to take that advice. The thing that bothers me about that is that i would not hesitate to cry foul if the member involved were someone for whom i do not have the same regard, and that troubles me. A woman i know once began seriously dissing my brother in public, and then began needling me because i didn't join in the "fun." My brother was there, too. It was her "party," so to speak, and in the end, i just left. My brother later let me know that he was very grateful, and as far as i was concerned, as long as i had not broken completely and irrevocably with him, i owed him that loyalty. (As it happens, i later had cause to regret my loyalty, in some situations where he dissed me, or laughed at someone else dissing me, just so he could keep on the good side of people of whom he ought not to have entertained a very high opinion--but that isn't germane to this situation.)

Perhaps it's a cultural thing. When i briefly lived in Ireland, my acquaintance would say: "You should go to the greengrocer in Lord Edward Street," or "You should buy your togs at the store on Bridge Street." What they were saying was perfectly natural to them, and i understood it immediately--the message is that people in our "set" patronize these businesses, and personal loyalty is a matter of paramount importance to the Irish. That didn't mean that i shouldn't complain if i thought i was getting a raw deal on my togs, just that i shouldn't vote with my feet unless and until i had tried to resolve the situation. At the same time, if my acquaintance had felt i had been treated in a shabby manner, they would have voted with their feet--which would have involved everyone agreeing to patronize a different clothing store.

But this is, of course, quite a different situation, and i am troubled that a sense of personal loyalty might lead me to acquiesce in something i don't believe in. I my "real" life, i had a friend who would casually make remarks of a slighting and contemptuous nature about black people. I finally had a private word with him, and he desisted. I have no illusions that his attitudes were changed, but i could not in good conscience have continued my acquaintance and mutely acquiesced in what i considered scurrilous remarks.

So how to deal with it here. It would be unfair to tell [EDIT: a certain member] that's she's disgusting racist puke, and then pass over in silence remarks made by others whom i consider friends. Beyond that, i cannot ignore that many people here have a low opinion of me for what they take to be a propensity to lash out at others (for reasons which ought to be obvious, i don't necessarily agree), and that makes the situation more difficult.

Among the posts here which have just been opportunistic cheap shots, though, there has been a lot of good advice tendered, and if i have failed to mention anyone in particular by name, my apologies. I nonetheless appreciate that people have taken the opportunity to offer their best advice, and i thank them for that.

I hate this kind of situation and just saw it recently at a poker table. One guy was making fun of another a bit, and the others while not exactly being mean or anything seemed to nod along. Then when he left the guy who I'd thought had been oblivious to the joking, or didn't mind it (I didn't know these folk or their relationships and he hadn't reacted all night) said he though the guy who left had been an asshole as usual, at which point the others once again did not join but nodded along.

I think they just didn't want to be involved too much in either side of that, but I don't like when people do that and I don't do it myself. I don't nod along when someone is badmouthing someone else just to avoid confrontation with them. I'll just flat out say "well that hasn't been my experience with them" or something if I don't agree and I wish people wouldn't give tacit approval to such things.



You know, I wanted to say that I actually don't hold you in as low regard for that as you might imagine and I feel bad for what I see as having started the recent "Setanta bashing" (and I really with it'd ******* stop already). Especially when I see piling on and petty insults tossed your way, it makes me with I had employed more of the restraint I was advocating you use.

Don't get me wrong, I think the style I used to use is disruptive and annoying and it ruins threads like my whaling thread when two people just go at it and make it personal but what I'm saying is that I'd be more than a bit of a hypocrite to hold you in low regard for a style I'd used here for years and my rhetoric to you is itself an example of what I was criticizing.

Despite the names I may have recently called you I recognize that I've got a bit of that ex-smoker zeal thing going on with my trying to change my posting style and I think I sometimes overstate the criticism I have for it through unnecessary rhetoric (e.g. I really think you are a genuinely nice guy, but called you names out of anger). To me those are good examples of where I failed to regulate my own emotions and intentionally put in an edge that I might later regret (and did, my opinion would have been just as valid without the insults and less hypocritical to boot).

Ahhhhh.....

I get this.

Personally, there are times when I don't know if set is kidding or not.

I assume he is, and then feel burned. Or maybe he's still kidding then.

But no matter, I like Set a lot.

Robert... I am not sure if I understand your point here. You used the word "pretext". It seems to me this is more of a principle than a pretext.

In real life there is a big difference between saying "you screwed up here" (a temporary state that doesn't attack the person) and saying "you are a failure" (implying a permanent state of failed being).

If you didn't really mean "pretext", then I agree with you.

I personally react much better when someone here says -- "your last post was idiotic" (as my posts sometimes are) then when they say "you are an idiot" (which attacks me personally and implies that I don't ever say things of value). I will tell "friends" virtual or real, when they do things that I think are stupid. I will never call a friend an idiot.

It is both. It is a good logical principle, it is a piss poor pretext to insult people and justify it by not having used an ad hominem specifically to do so.



I agree. But there's still a big range of non-ad hominems and some can be just as aggressive as an ad hominem.

If I were to say "that is the stupidest and most retarded thing I have ever seen" (which is the kind of over-the-top strength of conviction that I used to be much more prone to) it is not an ad hominem but isn't much better for that distinction when it comes to the effect of the way I couched my argument, which is more verbally aggressive than an ad hominem like "of course you would say that, you are a Republican".

I guess what I am saying is that avoiding ad hominems is a logical principle, and avoiding them can help you win friends and influence people but you can't just stop there and a non-ad hominem can still be predictably insulting.



I mean pretext to be mean. Often, the very intent was to rub my interlocutor the wrong way, or just be verbally aggressive for whatever reasons and I'd justify it as just vigorously attacking the idea. But none of the verbal grenades were necessary to attack the idea, and I could have done it dispassionately more often.



No doubt, but "your last post was less-than-ideal" is even less offensive and might be more readily taken to heart. I guess it depends on what your goals are, if you want to influence people's opinions or maintain relationships the verbal grenade is... less-than-ideal...