TWK: The Aelf dilemma

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 05 Dec 2005, 23:41 · from 2005-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 15:41:10 -0800
Subject: (urth) TWK: The Aelf dilemma
In-Reply-To: <20051205214936.78032.qmail at web34613.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <1f7617370512051246p7b0ce963yce307200bab06650 at mail.gmail.com>
	<20051205214936.78032.qmail at web34613.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <1f7617370512051541i5477b996yfd2d77275f1f099 at mail.gmail.com>

1. If the remark was intended as levity, I apologize; there was nothing
in the context that caused me to think so. In context - as a response
to this statement:

> > > > >>Worship isn't primarily a matter of seeking
> > > > >> supernatural reward.

which was clearly meant seriously, this statement:

> > > > >It's a matter of seeking to avoid supernatural
> > > > >punishment.

certainly _looked_ like it was intended at face value. With no
tone of voice, no emoticons as a poor substitute for tone of
voice, no markers at all -- well, humor in email is pretty hard
to carry off. As I'm sure you're aware.

Nonetheless, if it was meant as a humorous remark, I
_do_ apologize.

2. Nonetheless: I did not "diagnose your soul." I interpreted
a specific remark.

I'll be honest: the remark got under my personal skin. I'm not
(I hope) a religious bigot; I run with a crowd that includes
atheists, agnostics, Muslims, a Buddhist, several pantheist/
neopagan/Wiccan types... But I _am_ sensitized to anti-religious
bigotry, because there's a lot of it in intellectual circles, and
_especially_ in SF fandom; people who think that if you believe
in any kind of religion, and especially Christianity, you must be
 mentally defective.

So I maybe took a remark as meaning more than it did. Again:
my bad.

3. But perhaps you can see how, thinking the remark to be
meant seriously, I would indeed see "disrespect for anybody's
position or beliefs," in it.

4. Whoa. Waitaminnit.

> And then, on top of it, you arrogate to yourself the right to
> judge me and attempt to smear me as a racist -- once
> again failing to realize that you are only holding the mirror
> up to yourself.

I most assuredly did not call you a racist. I drew an analogy
from one kind of bigotry (okay, _perceived_ bigotry) to
another. Read it again:

> > It really isn't all that different from seeing a
> > black guy walk into a restaurant and assuming he's
> > going to order chicken and watermelon.

One more time I'll apologize: if you can somehow interpret
that as smearing you as a racist -- well, then I apologize
for that. I did _not_ intend such a smear. I was pointing at
the "all-ism" (to use a general-semantics term) of bigotry,
the way it assumes that "all" blacks like chicken, "all"
Trek fans are get-a-lifers, "all" religionists are mentally
defective, etc.

There. Several apologies in one note. In return, I hope
you can look at what you wrote and see how it might
have been interpreted differently from how you intended
it.

--Dan'l

--
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
                        -- St Teresa of Avila
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net