Bittersweet Candy Bowl Forums

Yes, you caught me. I'm bad at communicating. I suppose I may never have explicitly mentioned it here, but let me be explicit about it: I'm not good with words. If I thought I were, I would be a humanities major. I'm not a humanities major. That said, I don't think it strange that I see that when I talk the way I normally talk to most people, they understand me, and when I talk the way I normally talk (except sometimes with added reiteration because as an engineering major, of course I assume added redundancy can only make failure rarer) here, nobody understands me and I conclude that people here aren't really trying. At the very least I would hope that people would discard possible interpretations that are completely irrelevant to anything that's been said, and in theory that ought not to leave too much variation in the possibilities that remain. But I suppose that interpreting everything as random gibbering will tend to be self-consistent for all but the clearest of writers, which we have established I am not.

Though I would like to clarify one sentence: the "not" in "ad hominem is not a fallacy because it's occasionally misused" is paired with the "because." I think it could be more clearly stated as, "the reason ad hominem is a fallacy is not that it's occasionally misused." I can see where that could be improperly parsed, even if it seems silly to ignore every other sentence because one sentence appears to be saying something contradictory.

But, anyway, I was coming here to apologize because I realized I lied. I may have been condescending when I said that I would change the way I wrote, and implicitly saying that I wasn't going to be very polite when writing in the new style, but I still did mean it in some sense, and I realized that's not going to happen. I cannot easily change my style, and I am not easily convinced to actually try. I long since gave up on doing more than glorified talking to myself around here, so I'm not going to convince myself it matters.

Three questions and two statements:
1) Can you translate "trying to defend your the oppression against your sexual fetish against a sexual identity" into English? I assume the general idea is "I don't like you, therefore you are a furry, therefore your argument is invalid," but I'd like to know for sure.

2) Are you telling me that Susan does believe she is extremely famous? As I pointed out, that would change everything.

3) I don't think I'm intelligent because of how I write; I think other people are stupid because they can't understand me when I say things like "of course I am implicitly assuming that everyone involved is relatively sane, and otherwise my argument is invalid," and assume they can pretend to read my mind and present it as fact. In fact, if one were to pay attention, one might even note that I never say more about my opinion of my intelligence than that I'm not a complete moron, even when my intelligence is specifically made a topic of conversation. Nobody ever draws conclusions, reasonable or otherwise, from that, I've noticed.

4, and most importantly) Assuming that I do write in specific ways to increase my own feeling of intelligence, assuming I am in fact a blithering idiot, assuming that I go out every night to murder babies, why does that matter to the argument? Ad hominem is not a fallacy because it's occasionally misused. And since I've already insulted your intelligence once, I can just outright say that everybody with a brain can tell that your opponent's personal characteristics are not relevant--sorry, I mean "germane," I've got to remember that I'm talking to appear more intelligent--to the argument unless the argument is about your opponent's personal characteristics.

And in response to Kaxbe and Meowth, respectively, indeed I do love being condescending when people use fallacies, and how is it even possible to reply pedantically to something with no actual argument?

Sorry, I almost forgot:
Tl;dr: I never said I'm smart, just smarter than you, and I can tell because I know it has no bearing on the original argument and you don't.

MiwAuturu, on 26 May 2012 - 06:57 AM, said:

Someone really needed to tell you that trying to pretend you aren't saying tl;dr =/= intelligent.

But if it really matters that much to you I can try to keep my explanations brief; I'm mainly doing it to try to make it so that everybody in the forums, even the stupid ones, can understand what I'm saying if they care, but since I know nobody does it doesn't really matter whether idiots misunderstand out of boredom or insufficient detail and reiteration.

Tl;dr: that was a weak ad hominem attack and I expect better in the future. Also you can choose whether or not I insulted you back.

Kaxbe, on 21 May 2012 - 07:27 AM, said:

Well now I'm sorry that I've been too busy to stop by for the past several days, because I am going to have to respectfully disagree, and I do wish I had done so in a more prompt manner. I was expecting a much more angry and insulting response; I though I would be perfectly justified in ignoring it, and not feel obligated to explain and defend my position.

I deeply regret the prejudices that remain in society today, but I find people who use others sympathy, no matter how much they deserve it, to justify being unreasonably offended or gaining random special privileges annoying. And while Susan has every right to say that people who contribute towards this documentary are wasting their money--everybody is certainly entitled to opinions at least that far--I firmly believe that there is no good reason to find it offensive how others throw their money away. As I said, there is nothing beyond Susan's opinion of bronies to indicate there is going to be any whining about oppression, and even if there was, it is not reasonable to be offended that somewhere, somebody doesn't consider whether you have it worse before evaluating their own lives despite having absolutely no reason to think of you or anybody else in a similar situation. This wouldn't apply, of course, if we assume Susan believes either than transgendered people are a large portion of the population or that she personally is extremely famous, but I think we can safely assume that she knows neither of these is the case.

So, in summary, though I do hope that we one day live in a truly egalitarian society, being offended by everything accomplishes nothing and I refuse to pretend that actively looking for more reasons to feel victimized just because you already have some real ones is reasonable behavior.

Upon further reading, I would like to add that I do regret how I phrased my original statement, as though I do feel that somebody whining to justify the making of the documentary is not a reason to conclude that the documentary itself will be a long self-indulgent complain about oppression, I now see the thought process that led there. However, I do not retract my conclusion, as, in the unlikely case anybody actually reads what I said, they will see that my argument has redundancy and that the whining being a completely unfounded conclusion was secondary to expected whining being a poor reason for offense anyway. I'll also add at this point that, if this is going to turn into a long argument, it'll be an argument about taking offense and social inequalities and probably reverse racism too by the end of it, and probably won't be related to ponies at all much past this point, so if anybody cares enough to start debating the issue on the other side it should probably go in a separate thread.

Susan, on 20 May 2012 - 09:02 PM, said:

I hate to rain on your parade, but if you choose to automatically interpret all things brony-related as whining about oppression and get offended about it, that's your fault and your problem, not ours.

And a question: were we aware that Knux the Killer had drawn a fuzzy Discord, and I just forgot, or is this news?