From: Kalkor (kalkor@kalkor.com)
Date: Sun Aug 31 2003 - 13:51:52 MDT
[Kalkor meta]
I recieved a message from Joe Dees in my private inbox today. We have not
corresponded outside of the list and BBS before, and he was not invited to
send me a private message. This has happened before, and I let apathy ride
me into shrugging it off. I should have dissected those as I am about to do
with this one. Better late than never, imho.
I am returning this reply to him, as well as to the Church of Virus List, as
a document for future study, rather than as a way of starting up old
arguments. If anyone else has any comments about the original message, or
indeed my replies to the original, I would love to hear them!
Joe, please don't reply to me. And please don't send me any future
unsolicited emails. You may send me a message on the bbs if you'd like, but
your email address is going to be added to my domain host's spam blacklist.
He shares his blacklist extensively I might add. He's something of an
anti-spam crusader. Have a nice day.
Without further ado, here is the dissected original:
[Joe]
Hermit has purposefully imported people who will follow his lead in
voting his will and desires, and is now using that mechanism to
bludgeon the list into the ideological/political/memetic shape which he
has long envisioned.
[Kalkor]
Purposefully imported. Please support this assertion.
[Joe]
He also utilized an old and tried-and-true
mechanism in order to convict me of list flooding; that is, multiple
attacks (in which you, beknownst or not, co-operated).
[Kalkor]
You have just explicitly accused me of participating in an unwarranted
attack against you. I did no such thing, "beknownst or not". Any attack made
against you was fully warranted in my opinion, and I forcibly had to
restrain myself from participating in them.
[Joe]
When a person
(such as myself) refuses to allow their silence to be mistaken for assent,
that person can be accused of flooding a list if they simply answer all
the attacks directed at them by multiple aggressors, each of which only
accumulates a portion of the posts accredited to the defender. Six
attackers, each posting six emails, require thirty-six responses from
their common target; thus none of them can be accused of list flooding,
while their target, who did nothing but respond to emails directed
his/her way, gets tagged with a 36-post list flooding charge.
[Kalkor]
When 6 new threads show up in the list in one half-hour's time, each from
one person, each with a new thread title, each with maybe 1 or 2 lines of
text in the message... this is flooding by anyone's definition. You were not
responding to attacks or else each of the new threads would have been "RE:"
threads.
Here's what my inbox looks like:
Tue 19 August 2003
0356 "The Hateful Ideologues continue to bait me..."
0402 "Nietszche once said..."
0405 "Adopting my best Mr. Rogers tone..."
0412 "If'n ya wanna talk about a chill wind blowing..."
0416 "Vietcong on Virus"
0421 "Damned if I do, damned if I don't..."
[Joe]
Either
David is stupid and doesn't understand these dynamics and was taken
in by them, or he is malevolent, and used them as an excues to silence
me. There is no third alternative available between the horns of this
logical either/or dilemma.
[Kalkor]
I submit that you have just presented another logical fallacy, the false
dilemma. I'm sure you are aware of this fallacy and therefore I do not need
to submit a URL for you to learn more about it.
I would like to present another alternative, thus validating my claim that
you have presented a false dilemma:
Your presented alternatives:
1) David is stupid
2) David is malevolent
I submit there is at least one more alternative:
3) David is protecting the list from your malevolence.
as the three alternatives stated above are equally falsifiable, imho, I
hereby conclude that you have presented at least one False Dilemma in this
email, and that this false dilemma contains at least one, if not two ad
hominem attacks by you against David.
[Joe]
I, the Virion Cassandra, warned you and prophesied to you
(although I take no pleasure in being right) that this would happen, and
now it is happening before your very eyes.
[Kalkor]
Since when do you take no pleasure in being right? Can anyone truthfully
make this claim? When I'm right, I feel good! Especially when someone I
respect tells me I'm right. This is a social approval mechanism I'm sure
you're aware of. I'm very suprised you do not have it. We should study you
in a laboratory.
[Joe]
Now that he feels secure in
the opinion that he can dominate it, having abused the previously
described device in order to silence his most academically credible
adversary,
[Kalkor]
Academic credibility is a fallacy out of context of the subject in
discussion. I think that you will find it referred to as "Appeal to
Authority" if I'm not mistaken... It is used in commercials a lot in the
USA, such as when a football player recommends a particular toothpaste.
Which toothpaste do you use, oh academically credible Joe?
[Joe]
he wishes to retrieve political commentary from its out-of-
bounds status so that he may pursue his original intention of morphing
this list into an ideologically pure one-note Indymedia-type leftist
mouthpiece memetically enthralled tool.
[Kalkor]
Now you presume to know the internal wishes of other humans? Do you now have
mind-reading powers as well? I'm impressed, as you also seem to know the
internal motivation behind his wishes... "so that he may pursue his original
intention"
Sarcasm aside, this is a very presumptuous statement indeed. I'd really like
to know how you came by this mind-reading power.
[Joe]
And you have aided and
abetted him in the pursuit of that list-principle-betraying, and ultimately
destroying, partisan goal. I hope that you are proud of yourself; I am
most certainly far from proud of you. In fact, I am ashamed - but not of
myself. I grieve to see such a nobly conceived enterprise being brought
so low, and with the enabling co-operation of people of whom I once
thought better of than that.
[Kalkor]
Now, as this message appeared in my private inbox, with no addresses in the
CC: or TO: fields aside from mine, I can only make one of two assumptions:
that I was BCC:'d this message, or that it was written solely to me.
Either way, it was intentionally sent to me with no other recipients in the
header, the obvious intent that I assume it was sent to me personally,
directly.
With that in mind, I submit that in these last few sentences are several ad
hominem attacks against me. Undeserved, imho.
In addition, there is an attempted emotional plea in here: Joe is telling me
that he is not proud of me. He is also stating that he is ashamed! No
explicit statement about what he's ashamed of except that it's not him.
Joe, you know how much it pains me to hear these words coming from you. I
soooooooo long for your approval, I am utterly crushed that you are not
proud of me. (turn down your sarcasm meters, folks, this could get ugly)
In conclusion, I am submitting Joe's email address and indeed most of the
transmission path of this message as determined from the header, to my
domain host's spam blacklist. I would encourage you all to do so, especially
if you have recieved this same unsolicited email in your private inbox.
Also, if there is a board on the BBS for the study of fallacy in action, I
submit this post so that we can use it to study the Gator Fate.
Thank you all ;-}
Kalkor
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