Pike's ghost

James Wynn · 29 Nov 2011, 19:03 · 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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:03:40 -0600
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
In-Reply-To: <4ED52922.5040503 at irit.fr>
References: <SNT123-W32DE1E1E63A572375FA831CFB20 at phx.gbl>	<70C71EDFDC3B4AEBA0FD38FD41FB8551@Rover>	<4ED39725.9090804 at gmail.com>	<4ED3ABE8.8060807 at verizon.net>	<4ED3BEAA.1080107 at gmail.com>	<4ED3CB92.40502 at verizon.net>	<4ED3D4DC.3000409 at gmail.com>	<4ED3DFF2.8050208 at verizon.net>	<4ED3F57B.8050104 at gmail.com>	<4ED40796.8030108 at verizon.net>	<4ED41277.9040204 at gmail.com>	<4ED41B0E.6050507 at gmail.com>	<4ED41F91.1020906 at gmail.com>	<4ED4276E.8040608 at gmail.com>	<4ED4293C.2010906 at gmail.com>	<4ED50482.8030804 at gmail.com>	<4ED5064C.8000004 at gmail.com>	<4ED50A58.7080100 at gmail.com>	<4ED50C1A.2060103 at gmail.com>	<4ED511BF.8050105 at gmail.com>	<4ED51769.7080001 at gmail.com>	<4ED51CFB.7010209 at gmail.com>
	<4ED51E51.4060809 at verizon.net> <4ED52922.5040503 at irit.fr>
Message-ID: <4ED52C8C.4030905 at gmail.com>

On 11/29/2011 12:49 PM, Sergei SOLOVIEV wrote:
> I think that there are still some "minimum requirements" to the people 
> who advance
> an extravagant new theory -
>
> - if they claim that the theory is supported by the text, it would be 
> fair to do the
> work finding necessary quotations, and honestly present the context 
> (not to make
> the opponent to browse the whole book to find out that the next 
> sentence to the
> sentence just quoted is disproving the theory)
>
> - to be polite, and not to present disagreement as stupidity
>
> - not to try to intimidate the opponents presenting their hypotheses
> as common knowledge and consensus

It doesn't need to be a so-called extravagant theory for all these rules 
to apply.
There are people with extravagant theories who have presented them in 
detail many times in the past. It's probably not reasonable for anyone 
to be required to back every statement with proof each time they make an 
assertion.
If someone makes an assertion and you aren't clear on where it says 
that, why should anyone but the person making the assertion be required 
to search the books for the text. Have them quote the text verbatim and 
include the chapter (page numbers are typically useless). That's hardly 
an onerous burden.

_Arguing_ from the position that any interpretation in this text is mere 
"common knowledge" or consensus is bad form. There is actually very 
little in these books that everyone agrees on 100%. However, I don't 
feel the need for everyone to constantly qualify everything with "I know 
not everyone sees it that way". That is probably the one common thread 
in all interpretations of Wolfe's novels.

As for being polite, I'd say it another way. Remember that we're talking 
about literature here. Horn's fate does not rest on our conclusion. You 
don't need to be overtly rude to be annoying. You don't need to call 
people names to make people want to call you names.

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