On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 09:14:52AM -0500, Evan Prodromou wrote: > AS> The rest of your mail was based on similarly dumb ideas. > > Which ideas do I have that are so dumb? > That you shouldn't be mean when you don't have to? Yes, that's hippie shit. If you s/shouldn't/don't need to/ then it's just a tautology. As a "should", it's just dumb. > That when trying to solve problems with other people you should > address issues rather than personalities? And that's pretty much got nothing to do with anything you've said recently. In fact it's quite the opposite. If people address issues rather than personalitites then everything you have said is completely irrelevant, because they aren't going to be perturbed by the "speech" pattern of the people they are talking to, so we can phrase things however we damn well please. > Me> Hey, sure. It's impossible not to offend anyone. But it's > Me> always possible to deal with people politely and > Me> respectfully. How they react is their own business. > > AS> That attitude was the cause of the Earth-Minbari war. > > The cause of the war wasn't the Minbari's open gun ports, but the > Prometheus' firing in response. And, you know, that reaction ended up > being quite a problem for humanity. Evidently a Minbari sympathiser. The cause of the war was two groups assuming that the other would behave and react in the same way that they would. One acted in the most respectful manner they knew, and the other interpreted it as hostile. Things went rapidly downhill from there. And I'm not going to explain further if you still don't get the point. > Developing an OS is different from meeting a flotilla of warships. I > know it doesn't seem that way sometimes, but it is. It's called a "metaphor". > AS> The rest of the world does not share your notions of "polite" and > AS> "respectful", for all values of "your". I find yours to be > AS> pretty much the opposite. > > I haven't told you my notions of politeness and respect. And I don't need to know them. I already know what they aren't. > On my side, I find your point, that we should be forthright about > technical and organizational problems, entirely reasonable. I'd rebut > that we don't need to act like surly teens all the time in order to do > that. Unless you have an Aristotelian categorisation fetish that divides the world into "People who comply to my notions of politeness and respect" and "Surly teens", then I'd say your rebuttal is irrelevant. It's a variation on a false dilemma. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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