virus: Undecipherable Brettisms (was: Faith and Certainty)
MarXidad (marxidad@idirect.com)
Tue, 9 Jun 1998 23:43:55 -0400
I think this warrants it's own thread... Anyway, I've had real-time
discussions with Brett (they were pretty much like how it is here) so I do
consider him a friend of sorts. I'm not necessarily going to fend for him
here, but don't want to come across as anti-Brett, either. One of the
benefits of discussing in real-time was that I was able to ask him what he
meant exactly when he was saying it. I still had some trouble figuring out
what he meant with the first explanation but I persisted until I got close
as I could to a concrete real-world example. I think the problem there is
that the concepts are strictly abstract ones so I couldn't go further than
speaking in terms of being in an ideosphere, or at least that's the closest
analogy I could think of to what he was saying.
I did get an inkling of what Brett was expressing but he has this whole
agenda, as some of us may have gathered, so I don't think I understood The
Big Picture. Nevertheless, we were able to have productive conversations
where my secular arguments clashed with the Brettisms, finding some kind of
common ground. I think that some of what he was saying is very similar to
orthodox Virion ideology and I even mentioned that to him. He seemed to
agree with that, and I also commented on how his view was competing with
the rest of Virus'. I can check what became of that sometime later.
But part of what I'm trying to say here as that we should look at this
whole Brett thing in a more memetic manner: Brett is trying to infect the
list with his own foreign meme-complex and the slight (?) hostility towards
him is a classic example of the CoV immune system at work. So I think we
should try attacking this subject like that and maybe we'd get to some
resolution. Am I making any sense?
This is obviously a communication problem with his terminology being
incompatible with the rest of ours. There was a thread on that here before
where some were trying to explain it to him while some others tried to
defend him by implying we (I'm trying to be neutral, so "we" can be "you"
or "they"...)were being elitist or censorial or whatever. I was going to
put my two cents here, but I'm getting sleepy...
> Brett is merely Brodie's avatar, remember?
> I suggest that we conduct a memetic experiment on Brodie:
Let's not go back there, please. I think we considered the matter a closed
book. Brodie is not Brett; he couldn't possibly be.
>is "complexified" in fact a word?
com·plex·i·fy
Pronunciation: käm-'plek-s&-"fI, k&m-
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -fied; -fy·ing
transitive senses : to make complex
intransitive senses : to become complex
/_/ / /o / /
/ / / / / / Mark Cidade
/ / /) / / / _ http://www.marxidad.com/glub
/ \/\ \_/\/\_X/ ^^^^
"When a true genius appears in the world
you may know him by this sign: that all
the dunces are in confederacy against him."
- Jonathan Swift
"If you are out to describe the truth,
leave elegance to the tailor."
- Albert Einstein