>No, I don't think you are picking on me with this post and I am
>grateful.
>However, with all sincere respect, I would ask you to read your post with as
>much distance from it as you are capable of and see if it does not
>seem just a bit condescending toward poor Mr. Pope?
this is the text in question:
>> Pope's initial post may have been a blast from
>> another world, but we need not hammer him to death for his faux-pas.
Mr.Pope, from whom we have not heard since the beginning, probably can
handle the condescension, especially since, if i read the tenor of his
intervention correctly, he thinks we are foolish and puerile in our
political correctness. you're right, tho, it is condescending. let me just
say that it seems a condescension well within the bounds of civility; and if
i may read it at proximity rather than at distance, i wd say i cd handle the
same tenor of comment directed at me.
>Civility is not the same as game-playing.
playing, as i used the term, is not game-playing. civility is the ability to
treat the other with sufficient respect that "playing" (not game-playing) is
possible (ie tossing back and forth ideas, trying a new one on for size
rather than freezing at the mere thought of another approach, laughing at
the predicaments of our subjects even as they laughed at them, turning a
text around and trying it out for irony, etc.) civility that is so
humorless as to fail to forgive the others' faux pas is a recipe for boredom
and sterility. there is no way that another will not have (what my wife and
i affectionately in memory of our first computer -- a Kaypro -- call) B-DOS
errors. indeed we all have them and define them differently. so please,
let's be more forgiving. we have better things to do than bicker over whose
tone is more offensive.
>The declaration that civility is not always the best rhetoric, however,
>is not something to trifle with. If it really represents the viewpoint
>of a significant number of listmembers, we are in difficult straits
>indeed. I was hoping others might take some distance from it, perhaps
>even, on reconsideration, its author.
>Dennis Martin
on that i agree. (which is one reason civility must include humor -- else
how can we cut thru the cr-p?) particularly on a new and impersonal/personal
medium like email, i think righteous indignation is probably not a good
idea. that's something that really demands personal presence to "work".
rlandes
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