Why criticize ARI for rewrites?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I hardly think my advocacy of my ideas and criticism of the failure to adopt them are 'bullying'.

Phil,

I'm reading your posts right now, but I want to make this point clear before I go on. I didn't mean to insinuate that you bully and I don't think it. I never have.

Your nagging is anything but bullying. (How's that for a diplomatic way of putting it? )

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

And as a general principle, I admire your energy and industriousness whenever you tackle an issue. I realize that, whether or not it's an area that I would consider overdone, the work you are doing does take -enormous- effort and focus.

But I do feel free to criticize.

Phil,

You are referring to Robert above. And here is where you have the "behind your own eyes" blindness I have referred to. In a post earlier in this thread you said about Robert "and others"--presumably including me (and these are your own words): "single-minded focus on that to the exclusion of other issues."

When people out here in the rest of reality read things like that, they kinda take you at your word. They think you mean, well, you know... that they are concerned with one issue only... and they believe you are saying that they do not deal with any other issues. Kinda like what your words actually say.

Nobody has a crystal ball so they can get on your side of your eyeballs and see that you don't really mean that, even when you say it so clearly.

But I think I know what goes on.

I believe your automatic vocabulary to express a value judgment, especially when you feel strongly about something contentious, is based on the mental process of automatically deducing reality from principles, which is an epistemological Objectivist bad habit I see often in many folks. Your mind serves up words and phrases on autopilot at times like that and you are not even aware of what your words convey. Yet you present them in your argument as if they were a fact. (I don't just mean you, either. I've seen this often enough and in enough people to notice an ingrained pattern.) Exclusionary words like "single-minded, "exclusion," "always," "never," "everybody," etc., are usually present in this bad habit when there is no evidence of this kind of scope in the subject being criticized, or there is no way the person could possibly know something that wide-range.

For instance, both Robert and I mentioned that we do indeed post on many things other than what you complain about (and I still believe you missed the point about Mayhew--i.e., Robert had to focus on Mayhew's scholarship since Mayhew's couple of products he criticized deal with an area he is interested in and they are being falsely held up to the public and sold on places like Amazon as "accurate" or "the first" or whatever, not because he, Robert, wants to personally destroy Mayhew, i.e. again, Mayhew is the one who edited the book--in both cases--so Mayhew is the one he has to criticize, meaning he would have criticized any other person if such person had engaged in the same misleading crap, but that is another item for another time). We have covered many issues, yet you explicitly claimed we have "single-minded focus on that to the exclusion of other issues."

You do see the contradiction, don't you? I could bet good money and I believe I would win that you didn't really see it until we complained about it.

I think it's a good plan to periodically overhaul your verbal autopilot. (I do mine.) That takes an explicit act of volition, but I only see gains doing it.

I speculate about why you do what you do, I know, but I've had to correct this error in my own mind and I know I got it--or at least strongly reinforced it if I already had it (which I suspect is most likely)--from reading Rand. She certainly had this bad habit.

It might be interesting one day to make a rose garden of the best quotes from her that illustrate this rhetorical excess or problem of scope, but my true interest is in understanding her, not "diminishing" her. So maybe I'll do that or maybe I won't. I've seen enough to detect the bad habit pattern already. That means I don't need to make such a list for myself. But if it becomes necessary for something I am writing and people can't or won't see it, I will. After all, proof is proof.

Michael