Forum Overview :: Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego :: Re: I'm one of the new people that's supposed to see you as polite and civilized

[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"][quote name="fucking newbie"]I know you're likely to dismiss this out of hand because there's no rising chorus to back me up here so I'll minimize the effort I'm putting into this; it's a sunk cost probably but the insomnia is giving me time to waste. Take it as anecdotal evidence, I don't care, it's probably wasted words like nine-tenths of the site anyway. By and large your approach does not fill me with an urge to take your side or appropriate your rhetorical posture or ideas. Everything I've read by you has only made me wish you'd never post here again and with the energy thus saved go enjoy what you can in life. Maybe that would involve posting somewhere else frequented by those that shared your interest and treated you the way you wanted to be treated, I don't know.[/quote] I want to thank you for commenting. Your comments reminded me of the other guy in "Good Will Hunting," who realizes his friend Will is wasting his vast intellectual capacity - a great mind that he knows far surpasses is own - working as a janitor and blue collar worker, and hopes some day when he came to pick him up for work that Will had left a note saying he's gone to someplace that's a better use for his skills then wasting them in jobs he's clearly overqualified for. I kind of got the idea when I realized that the people here don't really read what I write, they have no reasons for what they claim and they're often making grandiose pronouncements of which they don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. That despite not reading what I write they think they're competent to comment about it; knowing nothing about my character means they're qualified to make judgements about it; and, of course, since they have no knowledge of mental illness they're fully competent to judge what is autism, asperger's syndrome or any other disease starting with "A". Unfortunately none of them has offered me any suggestions on what to do about my arthritis. I get terrible cases of what my sister - who also has it - identified as "trigger finger" where your hand locks in a "claw" position and it is in agonizing pain and nothing short of serious heat such as soaking in warm water will get it to unlock and back to normal function without even worse pain. But the "Cretinous Reprobates of Caltrops" do have their usefulness. If I want a true and correct analysis of Barack Obama's positions on something and where he actually is right, I'll put on Fox News after one of his speeches. They hate him as much as the republicans since they're all but a republican fanboy house. So any time they approve of or say that Obama has done something right I have to accept that as correct since they're not going to give him one iota of support unless it's clearly unarguable he did the right thing. Same thing for the other side, if I want to know when Speaker of the House John Boehner is right on something I'll put on MSNBC since they're extremely liberal. But I'd never watch Fox News to get serious critical analysis of the Republicans or MSNBC to get the same about the Democrats. I think that part of it is, until you mentioned it, I'd never really thought about it. I've been in places where people mistook me for having a completely different attitude and eventually I won them over because they respect good conversation and dialogue even if they disagree. This is a group of people so insular, so unwilling to consider that they might be wrong on an issue that they are completely unaware of the subject, that in some cases they don't even care to hear anything else. In short, most of the people here represent the typical attitude of your average American. On the rough order of the Jew-hating, negro disliking, ignorant redneck from some backwoods town who is of the opinion, "If English in the Bible was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me!" [quote]If I'm honest about it I'm not even trying to help you here, I just want to not watch the antics anymore because I have no appetite for them. Let's not mistake that for sympathy. Probably I'm risking the attention of the same bunch of people that think of you as a baited bear complete with muzzle and chain, but that's just how weary I am of seeing you spew all this stuff over and over and expect a different result, or justify in your head an eventual result, when you could probably instead figure out an activity that had a sure, visible positive outcome instead of hoping for amazing results.[/quote] Sometimes it takes someone else to point out where I've been wrong because I've let myself slip into very bad habits. My two biggest were (1) thinking the people here had any interest in rational discussion and (2) thinking anyone here cared whether they were right or wrong. They don't care, and I kind of came to that realization - thanks to you - that that is the case. I guess maybe I hadn't thought about it. But they're not going to drive me away. I sort of realized that the simplest way to shut them down was to call them on their bullshit. All they can do is throw insults at me or make comments that they have not the slightest qualifications to make, because they still think their opinions represent facts. It's normally safe for the inmates here to say things about games and such, opinions are not subject to validation; you're entitled to your opinion and there's no real way to prove it's right or wrong. But as soon as you say something quantifiable about the real world or about a person, then the only way you can justify your premises are with facts and evidence. Otherwise you end up with an unsupported gap that you can't justify, and that's when I get silence in response. They're not used to actually prove what they say, that requires using their brains, and when you use something you haven't used in a long time like a weak muscle, it hurts, which is why they cry out with obscenities in response. What I didn't think about was I recognized this in my first book I wrote in 1995, and didn't even recognize it: <div  style="padding: 20px 10px 10px 10px;">What we are discovering are what are called ‘gaps' in the series of conclusions you have made. Another name for it is a ‘break' in the chain of reasoning. You thought of something, you made a conclusion based on a series of premises. A premise is a statement, based on an inference, that is, a piece of information. If the inference is a fact, then the conclusion has a factual base. Where you have problems is because the conclusions are not based on evidence, but on speculation or conjecture, i.e. an opinion without evidence or proof. When you try to justify a speculation, you come up with a gap where the speculation has nothing to support it.</div> [/quote]