| > You know that you're the reason I wrote this article, right? This is exactly the attitude that made me freeze my main account away. People who take things that other people say and extend them to drastic proportions just so they can be dicks about it. Look man, you said you had a solution to the problem. What I said is hardly a leap. You have a funny definition of "drastic proportions". > But no, you won't address the ideas I put forth. You'll nitpick. You'll be an absolute snot just so that you can gain the upper hand in an argument. And so you might reach a point where I and people like me get tired of your bullshit and walk away, and then you'll declare yourself the victor because you were the last person to make a post in my comment thread, but all you're doing is making the person on the other side want to punch yourself in the face... You're descending into ad hominem territory here. Please don't. I didn't address your solution because I don't think there is one, and I don't see value in arguing about it. Perhaps I misunderstand the problem you're trying to solve. > They're interconnected. I never said they weren't - I limited my discussion to the assigning of blame, which I took to be your primary subject as well. But now, it seems to me that you are not separating the issues of "cause" and "blame" the same way I am. To be clear, of course the victims are part of the cause of any particular confrontation. It couldn't happen if they weren't there, so there's at least that. What I object to is assigning _blame_ to them. Causes for these things are shared - blame is given to one side or the other for their own actions. Your commentaries on battered wives and rape focus on what happens _after_ the incident. I am asking about the incident itself. The blame for the raping and the beating lies solely with the aggressors. > Is McDonald's to blame for making people fat? Partly. No. McDonald's is to blame for making fatty food. There's a difference. |
I use hyperbole. I ought to have said "proposed" solution. Either way, your response was snide and still hasn't addressed what I said in that point. I think that what I proposed would help the two sides understand each other in a way they don't know, and in my experience the more people get to know each other the better they get along. The disconnect at the moment is that nerds think other people are wasting their time, and other people think nerds only do what they do because they haven't got anything else going for them. When you make people like stuff, they form bonds.
You're descending into ad hominem territory here. Please don't.
I need to apologize to the people I've argued with in this thread, because I've been much angrier and snappier in these responses than is appropriate for Hacker News. This morning I woke up to find a bunch of emails from people telling me my blog was broken in IE and I found this on the top of Hacker News. I've been writing a post for a little while now that I was going to submit here; I only submit things here if they're quality things. This is part of my daily writings, where I spill out a bunch of things on my mind without thinking about them, admitting all the while that I'm not putting careful thought into my writings. So to find that sort of thing here and discussed by people calling me a sad angry little man really just isn't a good way for me to start the day, and it's not how I want to approach my work. So I'm mad because I'm finding myself seriously debating something I wasn't exactly serious about in the first place, but I've got a sense of propriety about my writings and so I refuse to let people dis what I've said without defending myself. You've stood out to me as one of the people who's most deliberately ignoring the things that I'm saying, though this response was a lot better. Again: apologies.
Causes for these things are shared - blame is given to one side or the other for their own actions.
Okay. By that standard I'm blaming the nerds for deliberately setting up a situation wherein they're persecuted, when they could easily avoid the entire situation by not being so deliberately hostile. Does that work?