At 04:02 PM 1/3/2004 -0800 Doug Pensinger wrote: >John wrote: >> As for the rest of your links, while they are mildly interesting, they >> hardly are supportive of your political attack. Nevertheless, I thank >> you for adding these links to your very substantive responses and >> critiques to the proposals in the piece I linked to, and for refraining >> from >> unrelated political attacks of questionable basis. > >This is why I quit responding to you, John; you feel the need to make >everything personal. You don't need to use sarcasm or be insulting to >make your point. I have no problem with you asking me to substantiate or >expand upon something I've posted or even offer a polite criticism, but >I'm not really interested in trading insults.
I honestly don't know what to say here. I am not trying to drive you away. I would just like, however, for you to view things from my perspective. I posted what I thought was a pretty fascinating, counter-conventional wisdom article that had a lot of interesting things to say. I get one response from it - a sarcastic, biting, caustic response that addresses not one whit of the issues I was hoping to discuss - but instead changes the subject to an unrelated, (and in my mind, baseless) partisan political attack. Moreover, again from my view, this response accuses me rather directly of posting something which is not in fact at all interesting or fascinating, but rather, quote, "spin" - which makes me either a "hack" or a "sucker" to post such as thing as being in the "fascinating/interesting." department that gets one to think outside the conventional wisdom. So anyhow, I do respond to all of this with a bit of sarcasm myself - albeit certainly sarcasm that is no harsher than what I received from someone who disagreed with my Lord of the Rings *movie*review* - and yet I also take great care to make sure that I also address whatever substance there was in what you had to say - even if it does completely change the topic. And yet, I am getting a lecture about how I don't need to use sarcasm to make my points? Well, if I don't need to use sarcasm - how about you????? Anyhow, like I said, I am *not* trying to drive you away. I feel that if we can just work out what the ground rules are, I'm sure that we can keep having civil disagreements on political issues here. I very much want to do that, as I do respect what you think and what you have to say. Contact me off-list about these ground rules if you want. John D. Giorgis _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
