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To: Washington_minuteman
I have never claimed to "know it all", but unless one makes clear and specific statements, one is almost forced to make some assumptions.

This is the crux of your problem. Rather than ask, "do you mean prolifing by government?", you assumed such. You are never forced to make assumptions when you can ask questions in lieu of assuming. You sound like the guy who's found guilty of a crime and says, "don't ya see, I had to do it!"

You assumed something in my post that wasn't there. You projected your omniscience onto my post to ascertain a meaning other than what is typed. This is why you rate "know it all". The further "always right" derives from the energy you spend trying to prove to yourself that it must be someone else's error, not yours, that creates the misunderstanding. How about, "the post is not clear to me in regards to who would be performing the profiling, could you elaborate?" instead of the condescension in your post #42 that assumes (or invents) something that isn't there.

Bye.

213 posted on 05/19/2002 7:56:51 AM PDT by Principled
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To: Principled
"Rather than ask, "do you mean prolifing by government?", you assumed such."

Yes, I assumed that. It's a reasonable assumption. Look, you wrote in your initial post, "Dammit. Protect my family...", which inferrs, admittedly from silence, that you wanted someone, other than yourself, to protect your family. That was followed by: "PROFILE!!". Now, since you responded to the article posted by GeneD, I suppose you could have been asking him to do that, or you could have been asking the subject entity of the article to do it. Nothing about your post would lead one to believe you wanted private citizens in general to enguage in profiling.

You may be wondering why I am belaboring this. Well, because I cannot understand why people will not write what they mean. You see, the crux of my problem, as you put it, is that I believe it is the writer's responsibility to write what he means, and not leave it up to readers to ask for clarification. In speaking, it is often necessary to seek clarification from the speaker, but in writing, the author has the responsibility, and the ability, to clearly state his case, the first time. You could have done that, but you didn't. Ambigiuty in writing is an open invitation to having incorrect assumptions made concerning one's meaning. It has nothing to do with some non-existant perception of my being omniscient. You were too ambigious with what you wrote.

Additionally, gutter-talk drives me to distraction, and yes, I make lots of assumptions concerning people who express themselves that way. From your subsequent postings, once you stopped with the vulgarities, you demonstrate that you can to experss yourself clearly and without vulgarity. This makes me wonder, are you delibertly presenting an image of yourself which is different from who you really are, or is it something you just don't think about much, if at all? Had you not initially posted a statement which contained a vulgar word, my response to that post would have been more respectful. Most likely, I would have asked you what did you mean, instead of following an incorrect assumption.

"You projected your omniscience onto my post to ascertain a meaning other than what is typed."

The above is another example which I believe you didn't write what you intended to mean. You should have written: 'You projected your perceived omniscience onto my post to ascertain a meaning other than what is typed.'

Obviously, I am not not omniscient. Arrogant and stubborn, perhaps. Bull-headed and opinionated; yes, but not omniscient. I realise you were meaning to be insulting with that remark, but please understand, to formulate a really good insult, you must not affirm what you're attacking. Using the word "perceived" would have been more effective in disarming the delusion of omniscience, that you're accusing me of.

There's another reason I chose to beat this dead horse that you ought to know about. I'm sick and tired of all this fearmongering coming out of government mouthpieces in the media concerning "terrorism". It's propaganda and it's disgusting. They say there's an unsubstantiated, yet credible, threat. Then, when nothing happens, they take credit for stopping it; whatever "it" was supposed to be. If something happens, they warned us ahead of time, making the resulting effect less horrible than it was intended to be. It's a clever way to always come out looking like the good guy.

Then, before embarking upon my journey into this thread, I had just come from reading a similar thread where some cretin suggested profiling all the Arabs and then shooting them. No qualification of the statement whatsoever. Just round them up and shoot them. Others were actually cheering that idea. Were they saying what they meant to say? I don't know. Their remarks didn't deserve the question, but I will remember the names. I guess that soured my attitude a bit.

So, I'm constantly on the lookout for something to divert my attention away from that. Usually, I try and ignore one-line posts and those rife with bad language. I'm not known for playing well with others, especially when they project a room-temperture IQ image of themselves through the use of vulgar and/or obscene words. Yesterday, however, your post just rubbed me the wrong way and I unloaded a lot of frusturation on you. I should have just ignored you post, as I did those other I mentioned above, but I didn't. That was wrong, and I apologise for doing that to you.

231 posted on 05/19/2002 12:04:23 PM PDT by Washington_minuteman
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