Mindy Newton

The dispute we have here is whether we hold a common standard for objective communication.

My dispute would be that such a thing does not exist

I don't think you said what you thought you said. In any case, I use a dictionary for starters.

--Brant

I think I'd better ask you what you mean when you say, "I don't think you said what you thought you said." Yes, that helps.

So, Brant, why don't you think I said what I thought I said?

I trust you realize that wasn't about you, but GS?

= Mindy

Edit: Brant, you were addressing GS? If so, I got it wrong.

... Federal legal tender laws, which state that government-controlled fiat currency MUST be accepted for many kinds of monetary transactions.

Perhaps neither you nor Ron Paul understands what "legal tender" means. More likely, Dr. Paul knows, but prefers to bank on your ignorance.

Hi Michael,

You manage to be pretty obnoxious without really trying. If you assume that one of your like minded fellows in our joint battle for our freedom is in a state of ignorance, why not come down off your high horse and enlighten one or more of us? You know there are new people joining this forum all the time. I should think you would want them to feel comfortable here by being civil and not confrontive nor condescending. When they mention that this seems to be a pleasant forum to visit I fear it is because they haven't encountered any of your more egregious posts. I will spare everyone the profanity which comes to mind when I read your far from enlightening post above. Thanks for your response. I learned quite a bit about you but nothing about what you are driving at regarding legal tender laws. If you have something substantive to contribute feel free to do so. I assure you I will appreciate learning something.

Wm

I agree, Wm. I don't know what he's implying. And I agree that the smear is gratuitous. C'mon, Michael!

= Mindy

Hey, MSK, how about posting that stuff about internet marketing here? I'd like to see it.

Mindy,

I will be doing exactly that. I am finishing putting some of my ideas into practice and after I have resounding proof they work and examples I can point to, I will be offering free training about some really good money-making stuff for newbies (as enticement for paid training for some even better money-making stuff, of course). I expect to do this both in blog posts and in email mini-courses. I will not specifically target the Objectivist world, but I will point to my work outside this forum once it is up for those interested here on OL.

For the time being, here is a quick overview.

The No. 1 product sold on the Internet is information. This sells better than sex, politics, religion, physical products and anything else you can imagine. So unless newbies are familiar with things like drop-shipping, or they don't mind endless trips to the Post Office for dispatching packages, providing information in a downloadable format is the most lucrative thing they could do. After you get a site, payment processor, promotion and delivery system up and running, most of this operates on autopilot and there is almost no overhead. So you do another. And another. And another. All at little or no cost.

Here's the first thing: you need something to sell. (You can also freelance your services, and there are supplementary things I will be including to do that, but the real money is in marketing.) You can get a product from other people by representing them (called affiliate marketing) or by outright buying (or otherwise obtaining) a product and selling it as your own (called master resale rights, private label rights and a host of other terms with nuanced meanings, but all meaning you can sell the product and keep all the money). You can also produce your own product, which is much easier that it seems. And for the shameless, you can even get your stuff ghostwritten for a little of nothing at specialized sites like Rentacoder, Elance, etc.

Products basically come in PDF files, software (program files on the browser side and scripts to run on the server side), video, audio, and membership sites. The most lucrative products are "How to" instructions. The most lucrative areas are money-making/finance, health/wellbeing, and relationships. Entertainment is also high up, but you have to know how to do that one, otherwise you are just a fan.

There is a term, niche marketing, which is within the success reach of anybody who is interested. A niche is a specialized market where people buy information. (Look at a magazine rack at the drugstore, for example, and you will see a bunch of niches.) Some niches are really small, but since the Internet removes geographical transportation as an impediment, a really small market offered to the whole world suddenly gets a lot bigger.

To sell a product, you need a place to sell it: a site. You can either buy a domain name and register it on a hosting account, then install site software like Wordpress or Joomla or a host of others (or even build a sales minisite from scratch), or you can use other people's stuff for free (Squidoo, Blogger, Weebly, etc.).

After that, you need a payment processor where you can receive money, especially from credit cards. The best two at this time are Paypal and Paydotcom. Incidentally, at this last site, you can take a product you have the rights to and register it and they will do all the financial stuff and provide you with the codes (Paypal also provides codes and processing, but not as much support for sales as Paydotcom, which actually uses Paypal as part of its operations). You don't need to be the author at either Paypal or Paydotcom. (You do need to be the author for Clickbank, which is another story, and a very good one, too. But that's for later as a newbie starts learning about joint venturing.)

Now, before doing all that, a wise marketer will obey the No. 1 rule in selling: sell what people want to buy. He will research to find out what people are looking for and buying. This kind of goes against the grain of Objectivists since Randian heroes are loners against the pack, but not one of her heroes are professional salespeople either. There is no shame in becoming competent at sales and learning the rules of how this field works.

In order to find out what people want, there are procedures you can go through to find out what people are searching for on the search engines (through keywords and keyword phrases). Then you evaluate which searches involve people buying stuff and which ones are simply searches for information or free stuff. Then there are procedures for profiling searchers so you know which ones buy what.

In short, the name of the game is to get your offer in front of pockets of people who want to buy what you are offering and speak to their interest. The rest is a bunch of techniques to do just that and there are many paths that lead to Rome. They call it driving traffic, but that is not accurate. When you do it right, it is more like getting in front of a big wave and preparing to get wet.

One of the great things about Internet marketing is that to be good at it, you have to give away a lot of great stuff as one of the ways to get attention and establish trust. This means that you can get a lot of great stuff for free if you look.

Also one of the best selling techniques is to get an email list of opt-in subscribers. By opting in, they give you their permission to send them free information and sales offers. If you can get your list to trust you by constantly sending them high-quality information, one sales broadcast turns into instant money.

The downside to all this (for me) is that profession-wise I am a perfectionist and I want to know everything. There is a hell of a lot to know...

Also, the hype is as thick as molasses in this field, so you need to establish some commonsense standards right at the very beginning just to get something done. It's great to dream about becoming a millionaire, but actually doing the work is not as exciting. You can easily get seduced into inactivity or sidetracked into doing stuff that is not productive.

This makes it imperative to learn about psychological behavior triggers. (Cialdini is tops on this.) You not only want to influence people to take the actions you desire (like buying your stuff), you also want to defend against doing stuff you will regret later, or at least be aware of why you are doing what you are doing.

I have only mentioned free stuff you can do (or really low-cost stuff) for now. You can also do Adwords and other pay-per-click advertising if you have strong nerves and like playing poker with card-sharks. It's great when you learn it, but you can lose you shirt with one small mistake, so I strongly believe that people should only get into that after they learn how to make money from free advertising and resources.

Also, as a huge financial problem is now facing the nation, my approach is the most sound one possible for the majority of people who will be searching for how to make money online. My main problem will not be finding people. There are already gobs of them and this will increase exponentially. It will be the panic driving most of them. I am thinking about how to get them to calm down enough to do the right things to make enough money to put food on their table and pay their bills.

More coming as this project matures. I am at the very end of my education-only stage. I have an enormous reservoir of technical information (although it feels like I only scratched the surface) and am now doing my first quality sites and trying out my new wings.

btw - You sell Objectivist ideas just like you sell other information. I will be doing that, too, as I go along. It will not be by sponsoring a quasi-religious movement, but instead by selling information and entertainment products to individuals eager for them. However, I expect Objectivism to be a secondary business line in my new career, not the primary one. That's for the most Objectivist reason of all: profit.

Michael

Great, Michael! Thanks so much, I'll watch for the more.

= Mindy

Michael, you have to admit it's a terrifying spectacle. But it's not the Illuminati, it's Dick Cheney and the neo-conservatives who are behind it. They want to scare us into declaring war on rainbows, so they can take over our back yards. It's obvious.

Barbara

What you two don't realize, is that she's a public school science teacher!

= Mindy

May I suggest a modification: you say knowledge = "information possessed by a consciousness". I propose: knowledge = "empirically corroborated information possessed by a consciousness" which is sometimes rendered as "justified true belief".

Ba'al's modification is a more precise statement of the condition of knowledge about anything that is judged to exist separate to our consciousness of it. We can have mathematical knowledge without empirical corroboration. Although there is a type of corroboration involved in mathematics, it is not empirical. It is corroboration with a reality created in the imagination that is formed from very specific principles. I would suggest that metaphysics is ideally a combination of both types of thinking, and both types of corroboration, if it is to be about anything real.

Paul

Here's an example, Paul: Your two "types of corroboration", above, are well-known theories of truth, one is called the "correspondence theory of truth," and the other is a "coherence" position on truth. If you had known and used these terms you might have said, "Math knowledge must be coherent, but need not correspond to reality." That covers sentences 2-4. Then, you could have said, "I believe both coherence and correspondence are needed in metaphysics." By the way, all the last statement actually means is that truth can't be contradictory, and must fit reality. I add that so that you can see that your "explorations" did not enlighten, discover, or explain anything. They were, rather, nearly incomprehensible, confusing, verbose, and literally a waste of time to consider.

Making sense is critical. You can't fudge on it. If you don't aim at making sense, you're the devil. :devil:

= Mindy

She [Ayn Rand] would grant that a woman should have a legal right to choose an abortion for any reason or for no reason, but not that she had the moral right to do so. To choose by whim rather than by reason is precisely what Atlas Shrugged most opposed.

Barbara

"Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered." -- Ayn Rand ("Of Living Death")

AR is here talking about the moral apperceptions of others, not the woman. Acting on whim or irrationality is immoral as such but not necessarily anybody else's business. I do think Barbara's statement needs to be reformulated. There is a difference between moral and moral right. That I have the moral right to do X means it is immoral to have a law that says I can't. That I have the moral right to be irrational means it is immoral to have a law that says I can't. But irrational is immoral except out of mistaken ignorance. Acting on whim in a serious context is even worse. There are contexts where that is safe and fun.

--Brant

Nothing wrong with Barbara's quote.

Rand said, "wish." A wish could, of course, express a mere whim. But a wish also might be a deeply considered choice.

= Mindy

What is your motivation is giving Israel a free pass?

Are you trying to show your habit of allegations with zero evidence?

But I'll give you two more chances. 1. Fork it up. 2. Put the Israelis you declaim (who more exactly?), Hamas, etc. on a scale of -10 (worst) to +10 (best).

I've read all Chris's posts on this thread--well, the whole thread. I don't see the language that is being reviled as extreme.

= Mindy

I want to note for the record that when I said I thought we all knew where Paul was coming from, I was not being sarcastic. (I think there were some non-semantic reactions there, GS.) Paul had been posting at great length on what his thinking was, what his method was, his assumptions, etc. Nobody who had been reading his posts could have wondered about those things!

= Mindy

I really don't think you do know where I am coming from. Your responses don't align at all with my intended meanings. I know. I intended them. I have no desire for further effort. It really isn't worth it.

Paul

Have you heard Peikoff's Objective Communication? Communication itself depends on sounds' and symbols' conveying specific meanings. We don't read minds. The effort to record and communicate in language is an effort to use sounds and symbols in a common way. Idiosyncracy is anathema.

All anyone you speak or write to has is the symbols (sounds or other.) If you don't use the ones that by common, linguistic accord mean what your "intention to mean" is, you have failed to communicate. It is not incumbent on others to plumb your non sense in search for your "intentions." It is incumbent on you to say what you mean.

The dispute we have here is whether we hold a common standard for objective communication. That doesn't mean a standard of excellence, note. It doesn't mean being eloquent, or well-read, or even right-thinking. It means that we try to say what we mean, and we are responsible for what we say. It means knowing what your words mean--even if it is just what you, mistakenly, believe them to mean. As long as you can and will explain what you mean by each term and each statement, you're good. If you are mistaken, no problem. You'll note that that is a description of how this and most blog sites in fact work.

My responses "align" with your actual meanings, my friend. You really should make further effort, because you're lost without it. I'll help you, if you like, by PM or email. Since you feel so strongly about your ideas, it would be a shame if you didn't acquire discursive skills.

= Mindy

Michael,

Frankly your qualifications seem purely academic. Are you applying for jobs where you would be supervising people who have years of law enforcement? The average law enforcement person has little respect for "theory". I suggest adding this training to your resume:

http://www.tonyblauer.com/ Or something like Krav Maga. Get really fit, it shows and the people you would be working with respect that.

Your prospective employers may have done an internet search on your name and found writings of yours that were anarchist/pacifist in nature. And I know some sense of that must have come out to some degree in your interviews.

I hope you can find something satisfying. Good luck in your search.

I'm really sorry to hear this story! I do think Mikee may be on to something, as I know the extreme clubbiness of law enforcement, and an ever-growing degree of defensiveness among individuals in that profession. "I've got your back," is both the first and last rule of our men in blue, in my experience.

Hey, MSK, how about posting that stuff about internet marketing here? I'd like to see it.

= Mindy

Korzybski coined the term semantic reaction. Basically it means a physiological reaction of an individual to words in connection with their meanings to that individual. So sometimes when you say something with a certain intended meaning someone else reacts to a different interpreted meaning of the same words. To avoid having negative semantic reactions one should ask "what do you mean?" if unsure about the intended meaning. Also it should prepare the speaker for possible mis-interpretations and so speak more carefully.

"And what do you mean when you say that? And what do you mean when you say you meant that when you said what you first said? And what do you mean when you say that? And on and on. I honestly think you should try out, "And what do I mean when I say this?"

= Mindy

I want to note for the record that when I said I thought we all knew where Paul was coming from, I was not being sarcastic. (I think there were some non-semantic reactions there, GS.) Paul had been posting at great length on what his thinking was, what his method was, his assumptions, etc. Nobody who had been reading his posts could have wondered about those things!

= Mindy

Korzybski coined the term semantic reaction. Basically it means a physiological reaction of an individual to words in connection with their meanings to that individual. So sometimes when you say something with a certain intended meaning someone else reacts to a different interpreted meaning of the same words. To avoid having negative semantic reactions one should ask "what do you mean?" if unsure about the intended meaning. Also it should prepare the speaker for possible mis-interpretations and so speak more carefully.

"And what do you mean when you say that? And what do you mean when you say you meant that when you said what you first said? And what do you mean when you say that? And on and on. I honestly think you should try out, "And what do I mean when I say this?"

= Mindy

Ba'al - That was a great letter. Appreciate you sharing it with us.

Mindy - It's amazing that you have a Civil War journal. To see something handwritten that long ago would bring me chills. Especially knowing it was from family!

~ Shane

Coincidentally, he mentions being in a city very near where I grew up, a place we visited often!

= Mindy

This is in response to a discussion else where on the Civil War, the War against Southron Rebellion and Treason.

Please read this for the full text of the letter written to the Mayor of Atlanta by William T. Shermn:

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/sherman/she...rn-atlanta.html

The SOB was a hell of a writer. Essentially he said the knife was falling, stop standing under it.

--Brant

Ba'al,

The link provided is no longer available. Do you have an alternate link?

~ Shane

Try http://www.sagehistory.net/civilwar/docs/ShermanAtl.htm

Ba'al Chatzaf

I happen to have an ancestor who fought with Sherman during his march through Georgia. His name was Pliny Trumbo. We have his civil war diary. The diary shows a lot of misery, but no political or military thought of significance.

= Mindy

Mindy,

I don’t know what reservations Rand had about the correctness of contemporary theory of evolution.

Chris Matthew Sciabarra reports (“The Rand Transcript” JARS 1(1), p.9) that Rand took a course in biology in the spring of 1922 at St. Petersburg University (Petrograd State University). He thinks her teacher was likely Lev Semenovich Berg, who was the author of Theories of Evolution (date?).

Robert Campbell notes that in 1981, a year before her death, Rand remarked at a public forum:

I must state, incidentally, that I am not a student of biology and am, therefore, neither an advocate nor an opponent of the theory of evolution. But I have read a lot of valid evidence to support it, and it is the only scientific theory in the field.

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...;hl=&st=100

Careful Reading

http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/...879120902233438

Science in Russian Culture

1861–1917

Alexander Vucinich

Chapter Nine: “Biological Evolution: Facts and Controversies”

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id...esult#PPA273,M1

Thanks so much. That settles it for me.

Yes, there's a difference between what goes on in our brains and what goes on in the external world. I didn't think that was open to legitimate debate or that it required affirmation by Korzybski. And yes, of course knowledge-- which means "information possessed by a consciousness" -- requires consciousness; that, too, doesn't seem open to debate. I question your statement about Fido, however; whether it's true or false, how do you know it?

Barbara

May I suggest a modification: you say knowledge = "information possessed by a consciousness". I propose: knowledge = "empirically corroberated information possessed by a consciousness" which is sometimes rendered as "justified true belief".

I don't consider religious beliefs which are information possessed by a consciousness and totally contrary to fact as knowledge. It is more like wishful thinking in best case and outright insanity and delusion in the worst case. I do not consider that knowledge.

Humans spend a lot of time "living in their heads" and much of what occupies the area behind their eyes and above their chin is balderdash and nonsense. Not that I have any strong objection to the mild but pleasant fantasy taken on for amusement, mind you.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I don't think your distinction holds up, Baal. Her information is empirical, or derived therefrom.

= Mindy

There has to be some explanation of why the two levels of abstraction are remote, though. Physicists will want to say, I think, that first-person psy. terms don't enter into physical descriptions at any level of abstraction. I have in mind a way to answer that challenge.

Well, the rather physical and physiological description in terms of neurons, synapses etc. is in fact also a level of abstraction, but a low level compared to that of the psychological level. By going to higher levels of abstraction you ignore the physical interactions of individual atoms and electrons and consider aggregates of such interactions and aggregates of aggregates etc. To use the computer metaphor: you no longer consider voltages and gates, but first aggregates like bytes and memory, then an abstract description of the changes in those bytes in terms of machine language instructions (mov, clr, jmp), higher language instructions, subroutines, procedures etc. and finally the terms of the user interface (making pictures on a screen or playing chess etc.). Each level of abstraction can be seen as built on a lower level. So roughy you have the lowest level, the physical level (atoms, electrons, forces etc.), the chemical level (molecules), the biological level (from aggregates of organic molecules to the behavior of living entities), the psychological level (the intentional stance found in humans). Of course this is only a rough classification, there are overlapping areas like physical chemistry, molecular biology and psychofysiology.

The next, and burning question is what is different about certain physical/neurological processes such that they are what conscious processes are?

It is a form of information processing, but we still have to learn a lot about the details. There is the relatively simple form that we find for example in insects, which have rather rigid (even if very clever) programs, and the most complex form is the human brain, with its faculty of considering its own processes, making models of the world that can be extrapolated in the brain, so that we can reason and make predictions, in which the emergence of language probably plays an important role. Now I think it will take decades before we reach some good understanding of the process, as it is extremely complex, so be patient...

Yes, no disagreement, but I meant specifically that the physicists aren't going to support psychological language, etc.

Then, as to the second part, I certainly will not be patient! But that's my problem.

What I meant is in what terms that describe neurophysiological processes, such as transduction, projection, adaptation, etc., are we going to be able to find the unique new way matter can be gotten to behave, which is, at least dualistically, consciousness.

= Mindy

Oops, I didn't make myself clear. I do realize you were discussing Rand's implicit views. I was wondering about how you chose to describe Rand, implicitly, as dual-property versus dual-aspect. I subscribe to the dual-aspect view, myself. I think what that theory needs is an explanation as to why, and how the aspects come to be had.

I'm not sure a dual-property view gets you anywhere. Metaphysically, you still have to explain the duo, including interaction, don't you?

If you mean what I think you mean, I agree with you. The problem is the rather vague and conflicting definitions of all those terms, I've searched a little bit on the Internet and I found the information rather confusing. Therefore I try to avoid such terms and try to describe in my own words what I mean. I've already posted a lot of messages more or less relating to your question on this forum (search for example on "determinism" in my posts), and I won't repeat all those arguments here. In my opinion consciousness is a process that is only understandable to us in a high-level description of the workings of the brain, but it is essentially one and the same process as that which in principle (if not in practice) can be described in terms of all those firing neurons. I think that would be similar to your dual-aspect view. The nice thing is that you don't need mysterious interactions between mind and matter, the whole so-called problem of how the mind can initiate physical actions disappears. There is only one single process, we only switch in our description from the high-level intentional stance to the low-level physical stance. In fact we do the same with computer software: the instruction "print file X" is a high-level description of a process that is realized in the hardware of the computer and which results in the physical action of printing the contents of file X on paper.

Yes, I agree with you.

There has to be some explanation of why the two levels of abstraction are remote, though. Physicists will want to say, I think, that first-person psy. terms don't enter into physical descriptions at any level of abstraction. I have in mind a way to answer that challenge.

The next, and burning question is what is different about certain physical/neurological processes such that they are what conscious processes are?

= Mindy

Mindy,

No. Jon did. I intimate that you ignored his strawman (implying a sanction).

I normally don't like the strawman technique, but then competitive debate is not my favorite form. I never use the strawman except to exaggerate an already existing one. Let's just say I am not adverse to putting new clothes on a strawman to show his true nature.

Here is a fuller explanation. What happens to a celestial body that gets hotter and hotter and hotter? It eventually turns into a ball of fire. Jon claims that my understanding of global warming in a very acrimonious debate was precisely this, without the ball of fire thing.

That was introduced to derail the debate and turn this into an "us against them" issue. (No more ideas. Sides instead.) Isn't that what a strawman is supposed to do? I merely added the ball of fire thing to show how ridiculous it was.

I am still awaiting a corroborating quote. I seriously doubt one will be forthcoming. For the record, here is my original quote. It was the thread starter. It was at the beginning of the debate, not during it.

I have never been interested in ecology one way or another, so whenever I have seen the phrase, "global warming," I always assumed that it meant something like the earth getting hotter from the atmosphere all the way down to the core. I was pretty surprised to see that it was merely the weather and the atmosphere (and, to a smaller extent, the ocean). A much better term for me to have understood at my lack-of-interest distance would have been "warming of the earth's weather." I am sure that there are many people who are at the awareness level I was on this and they would be surprised to learn that all the shouting is not over our planet getting hotter. It isn't. Only the weather is.

This is a fight and crusade about the weather.

In other words, I kicked off the debate by saying that this had been my mistaken impression before I looked at some material. Before that thread, I don't recall writing anything about global warming. Jon's contention is that I adhered to that position after a lot of debate. Look and see for yourself (my bold):

I claimed that you admitted to understanding global warming as about earth-warming, as opposed to atmospheric warming. And this really is what you thought, only about a year ago, and after submitting many opinions about the global warming debate.

This smacks of intentional distortion to show just what a dummy I am, thus I should take his advice, keep my trap shut and listen breathlessly to the wise ones. I won't say this is the case because I respect Jon, but it certainly qualifies as a strawman. This kind of crap is the problem with competitive debate. People focus on people and not on facts.

You are free to your own opinions, of course. But before sanctioning a strawman, I suggest you look at what is proposed and not just accept an opinion blindly. On certain issues like global warming, I have found that people are not very objective and they are prone to distortions and errors.

I personally see no value in winning an argument (whatever that means) by distorting what someone wrote. I do see a lot of value in keeping to the facts, whether an argument is won or not (whatever that means).

Michael

I didn't see a straw man argument from Jon. You are saying I did, and that I then did something that counts as a sanction of it? I don't know the facts you are using here. One thing I will make explicit is that I don't remark on every error I read here. That's got to be clear to anyone, and, I would think, it must be everyone else's policy also. Just think what that would mean!!

The business above about your statement from long ago might give you reason to complain that Jon's composed a straw man, but it's ridiculous to imagine I have knowledge of it and sanction it! In fact, reading the quote you included, your interpretation of the matter is right on. If that's all Jon has to go on, he's mis-remembered things, or mis-stated them. But I'll thank you to keep your firehose closed down to something like the diameter of the fire.

These are petty matters compared to the refusal to acknowledge and uphold any intellectual standards, which now threatens to dominate this site.

= Mindy

Great piece, Stephen. I'm wondering what part of biological evolution Rand would have held suspicions about? Do you know?

= Mindy

Paul,

I'm unsure if you saw my post #300, since it was at the end of a page and you cross-posted starting a new page.

In case you didn't see that post, please read it.

--

Mindy, it's not the first time MSK has employed what amount to male-chauvinist responses.

On the mind-body issue, that is the center piece of the book I'm hoping to finish before I depart this earth. I'd like to continue the discussion, but I truly am extremely time-pressured now -- attempting to get some refurnishings accomplished before our annual "Thanksgiving Seminar," fall chores meanwhile, with many, many trees dropping many, many leaves, plus a series of conferences pending (e.g., I'll be gone 4 out of 7 days next week attending conferences).

I hope we can continue on the mind-body issue on another thread later.

Anyway, I hope we can get back to the subject, but I haven't time now for posting on it.

Jon Letendre, thank you!!

Ellen

___

Yes, we must discuss this. It is a subject I have worked on for a very long time. I, too intend to publish on the subject. I've been reluctant to air my original thought on a public site. At the same time, I'm wild to get critical feedback on this, so when you have time, let me know.

= Mindy

You're right about that, Jon. I believe it's a straw-man technique. Defend oneself against an "accusation" that was never made. It's a tactic chosen because that defense is win-able, while the real issue is a lost cause. If nothing else, it tends to de-rail the subject, because the argument then becomes whether or not the straw-man issue was somehow implied...

It is very, very common, of course.

Mindy,

You are right. That's exactly what Jon did with me with that global warming crap. (You should read that thread.) All I did was return the favor and exaggerate his own nonsense a little. I am still waiting for a corroborating quote from him. Let's see if he can find one.

I observe that people who debate competitively usually turn a blind eye to the strawmen that support them, while criticizing the strawmen that oppose them. I call that a double standard, but that's me.

As you said, "It is very, very common, of course."

Michael

You intimate I've argued a straw man? When and where?

= Mindy

Michael writes, “Whatever my words were, I have never believed something like the earth becoming a ball of fire like the sun (as your words suggest) and I never intended that meaning.”

I don’t recall claiming you suggested an earth that is a ball-of-fire. I don't think my words have suggested that.

You're right about that, Jon. I believe it's a straw-man technique. Defend oneself against an "accusation" that was never made. It's a tactic chosen because that defense is win-able, while the real issue is a lost cause. If nothing else, it tends to de-rail the subject, because the argument then becomes whether or not the straw-man issue was somehow implied...

It is very, very common, of course.

= Mindy

Old hag? You suck old motor oil, Michael.

Ellen is the reason I read this site. Even if she were in a wheelchair, I would still want to park my...

...thoughts and dreams beside her.

No, you don't really suck. But you keep getting in it with Roger and Ellen, for example—on subjects where you just don't know what the frick you're doin'. They've pleaded with you. It's not a big deal. Just slow down. Think about what you want to say. Don't say too much.

Don't talk about global warming if you don't realize it's about air temp and not under-ground temp., for example.

Maybe you're an artist who should step away and let what happens happen.

That bit about park your dreams and thoughts beside her, that's gutsy. Raw meaning.

= Mindy

Paul,

I read through your post #289. I'm going to speak frankly now while I'm feeling this strongly:

In all the time I've known you in listland, you've never before angered me. I'm angered now, and I'm feeling, oh, hell, never mind; just forget it and drop it.

Ellen

___

Dayaamm!

I had just skimmed post #289 because it was so long. This made me want to read it carefully, which I did.

Ellen's lovely when she gets miffed.

Michael

"Ellen's lovely when she gets miffed." That is monumentally patronizing, Michael.

= Mindy

I enjoy reading fiction...I sway from fantasy to sci-fi every couple of years. I love movies. I enjoy getting out to the beach with the wife and kids. Just about anything that has my kids smiling is good for me.

I started out playing D&D for many years since HS. Haven't done pencil & paper gaming for some time...that got taken over by WoW. Can you say four level 70s on Moonrunner? I love the community of players where you can hang out without hanging out with people all over the world. First-person shooters = great stress relief. But I mainly love games that are incorporated into a great story. So my faves would be RPGs. Board games like Chess, Monopoly and Risk top that list.

~ Shane

Went Sat. night to something called "Video Games Live" which is a sort of concert with lights, a theatre screen showing video game clips, an orchestra and chorus, vocal solos and a pianist who has composed some of the biggie scores for games, and a few other effects. My daughter loved it. Surprisingly, the audience was quite old, very few young teens even, largely college and older. The music was good, if way too loud. It tours the world, I understand.

I like reversi. Very quick to learn how to play, but very intricate strategy. I play minesweeper occasionally, it becomes a cognitively myopic trance sort of thing. I think it's good for the brain, though not much fun. There's a great puzzle book called 1001 Playthinks, very challenging.

I play tennis, only doubles these days, well, mixed doubles with my husband a little, there's not much mixed doubles around any more. I have a horse and ride several times a week. That is very effective at taking your mind totally away from other things. I collect rocks and have lapidary equipment to cut and polish gem material. I live in a glacial-terminal-morraine area so there are many types of rock and minerals here, and some very nice gem material. It's like treasure-hunting. There's lots of stooping, bending, lifting, and carrying involved, so it's good exercize, and being outdoors, especially at beaches, adds to the experience. I do some music. Performing is another activity that takes you wholly away from the everyday world.

= Mindy