Formal complaint

António Marques · 26 Nov 2011, 17:20 · from 2011-November.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: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:20:29 +0000
Subject: (urth) Formal complaint
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W157278F42813F21553E511CFCC0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W157278F42813F21553E511CFCC0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4ED11FDD.8000107 at gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote (not to me):
> (...) You see, yet you do not SEE.
> (...) I hope you are not suggesting (...)
> As has been established in this conversation (...)
> So, how can you casually postultate (...)
> The entire argument is fishy (heh) from begining to end. I see no reason
> to ignore that stench other than pure stubborness and a determination
> to remain deluded. But, ah well, as we know, we humans are programmed
> to accept the big beautiful lie while patting ourselves on the back
> for being so clever as to notice a few small, nasty ones.

Lee Berman had also written (again not to me):
> Disagreement is one thing. Derision and ridicule is another. We all
> know how to exit an argument and "agree to disagree". If instead, a
> poster chooses to resort to insulting the ideas of others, I find
> that worthy of addressing.

And the same Lee Berman has had the nerve to say (not especially to me):
> *We are represented in here by our ideas*. Disagreement is one thing.
> Using derrogatory labels for other people's ideas is another. In
> here, that is a form of personal attack. I join Mo and Ryan and
> Antonio in their distaste for it and their denouncement of it.

And Lee Berman said and did a lot of other things, which everyone can 
consult should there ever be an interest in it.

And *I* say that I'm tired of Lee's boorish behaviour. Lee is the person 
responsible for turning any discussion of ideas into a discussion about 
people. Lee does that systematically, whenever arguments he thinks are 
cogent fail to impress others. Lee feels personally insulted every time 
someone disagrees with him, and immediately turns to (trying to) 
belittle the other party by means first of (what he thinks is) 
condescendence, then turning to victimisation should the other have the 
nerve to respond. This toxic attitude has been on display for months, 
and has the unfortunate particular of being contagious, as frequency 
pushes normality and even others who do not primarily indulge in it are 
seduced by its effectiveness in chasing away whoever has enough 
upbringing not to be drawn into it.

Someone had to complain, so here I am.

(As to what I'll do? Some time ago I had opted just to mark Lee's stuff 
as read by default. But when there are real discussions going on, after 
one has read all the others, the temptation to see if Lee has something 
of interest to add overrules better judgement. Yes, occasionally there's 
something of interest in it (I've commented on it, and have known how 
not to get *myself* entangled). However, the offensiveness to others 
that one eventually meets is of such degree that it makes it all not 
worthwhile. As such, I'll just update my filter to delete all of Lee's 
messages as they come in. This is not something I've ever done. I've on 
occasion temporarily ignored people's stuff. Recently, on another forum, 
I've decided to permanently ignore a certain person, but I've made it 
clear it was more due to incompatibility of style, with a bit of what I 
considered questionable tactics, than to offense at or lack of 
worthiness of the other bloke's contributions. Here, however, it's quite 
different. There's things that my inbox just won't condone.)

And I thought that my complaint was relevant to the List, so here it is. 
It's just one message, anyway, hardly an avalanche.

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