quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter I do consider Stirner, Nietzsche, and Sartre to be influences of mine (Nietzsche in particular.) I believe the dichotomy that you are referring to is somewhat different than the one I've been referring to (although the confusion is probably due to my lack of specificity.) I agree with Hume (and disagree with Kant) that "Reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will." To put it simply, in my view it is the function of reason to provide the "is" and the function of emotion to provide the "ought" (or at least those fundamental "oughts" from which other "oughts" can be derived by reason.) To be more specific, I believe emotion is key to the forumlation of decision-making in that the ultimate motivation behind all actions is one or more value judgments which cannot be made by reason alone. My proposition about the seperation of reason and emotion assumes this relationship. What I am concerned with is the elimination of irrelevant emotional data from decisions regarding what "is." A particularly conspicuous example would be the person who believes that God exists because they were able to "feel" his presence. This can also take the form of decision-making with regards to what "is" the course of action most likely to accomplish a particular goal. The goal as the research you referred to (a good read by the way) is what can be traced back to emotion. Determining the efficacy of available avenues by which to pursue that goal, however, does not require additional emotional input. If you need further clarification, I'd be happy to oblige.

No further clarification necessary. Our positions, then, are pretty much identical. The following, in particular, sums up my position exactly:

quote:

To be more specific, I believe emotion is key to the forumlation of decision-making in that the ultimate motivation behind all actions is one or more value judgments which cannot be made by reason alone.

I'll let the cross-examination of your character and actions continue unabated now. In fact, since we're on the subject, I'd simply like to make a couple of quick observations with regards to this matter as an impartial observer:

This matter boils down to differences in opinions with regards to the course of action that Arbiter decided to engage in following the girl's actions. Following our discussion of the role of emotions in ultimately deciding the course of action that a person engages in, it seems to me that Arbiter's actions stem from his strong attachment to such values as honour and loyalty (perhaps power also) that trumped other values such as pity or sympathy (for instance) in this case, and which prompted him to choose the course of action he ultimately chose. This, in opposition to others who might have chosen an alternative course of action based on a different set of values, which would have been at the root of their decision not to engage in a similar course of action. At the end of the day, this is a debate between one value system over another. Although I don't condone his particular actions stemming from his particular value system in this case, many in this entire discussion are in the wrong when they attempt to cloak their opinions with claims of superiority of one value system over another in the objective sense. The most that can be said is to recognize that there exists a fundamental disagreement between two value systems, and perhaps to express that explicitly, but that's about it. Furthermore, attempting to psycho-analyze the root causes of Arbiter's value system in this case within the context of theories of masculinity is a futile exercise, considering the fact that we are not privy to his biological nature or life experiences, the two most basic elements in determining the latter.

This is dragging out into a pointless flame war. Which I've really tried to avoid (note: even when critised I didn't perpetuate it, which would have been very easy).

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter In case you couldn't figure it out, I don't believe for one second that she genuinely killed herself.

then why say (note: I'm commenting on the choice to state, not the validity of, the claim that she killed herself)

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter I've heard that she eventually killed herself, although not from a reliable source. But to be honest I don't care one way or another.

?

As I've said before I think this is more a case of just big talk rather than unbeliveable malice (which was the way it was initally infered in the origonal post >here<).

Can we move on now?

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If you can read this, I'm seriously fucking bored.

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter Leave your nonsense at the door. If you have a valid argument, then make it. Otherwise, I'll generously accept your failure to produce it as a concession.

You play two cards over and over again.

Card 1: Throw in the term "Straw Man Argument" and prance around distracting the natives from the issues at hand. Use of a term doesn't guarantee its veracity.

Card 2: Long expositions about honour and justice, and you prance around distracting the natives with that one. You are neither a blood nor don, stop translating your secret club from the backyard fort where it resides to realms where people might justify your behaviour.

What you fail to realize is that except for the few who are in fact distracted by those two cards, a lot of us have moved on from your less than stellar light show because we recognize both as being nothing more than thimblerigs.

Your behaviour is not acceptable, playing cards 1 and 2 over and over again will not change our minds. At this point we are trying to determine who is behind the proverbial curtain. In order to determine that, yes we have to speculate, and the first decision we have to make is whether or not we believe any of your tale.

I don't. And I tire of cards 1 and 2. If others wish to play another hand with you in this thread, that's their perogative. I'll take my deck elsewhere.

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Светопресавление
your pearl casting hero

I'm not trying to start a flamewar with you Arbiter but Subey makes some very good points. I'm looking forward to you and Subey go at it. I have yet to see a valid argument from Arbiter.

quote:

Originally posted by Subey You play two cards over and over again. Card 1: Throw in the term "Straw Man Argument" and prance around distracting the natives from the issues at hand. Use of a term doesn't guarantee its veracity. Card 2: Long expositions about honour and justice, and you prance around distracting the natives with that one. You are neither a blood nor don, stop translating your secret club from the backyard fort where it resides to realms where people might justify your behaviour. What you fail to realize is that except for the few who are in fact distracted by those two cards, a lot of us have moved on from your less than stellar light show because we recognize both as being nothing more than thimblerigs. Your behaviour is not acceptable, playing cards 1 and 2 over and over again will not change our minds. At this point we are trying to determine who is behind the proverbial curtain. In order to determine that, yes we have to speculate, and the first decision we have to make is whether or not we believe any of your tale. I don't. And I tire of cards 1 and 2. If others wish to play another hand with you in this thread, that's their perogative. I'll take my deck elsewhere.

More red herrings and a simpleton's cop-out, but still nothing that resembles a rational argument. Concession accepted.

Nice side step of what I put before (no doubt your responce will just be an insult as it has to pretty much everything everyone said which you couldn't respond to).

Give the way your "ideals are your own" and were

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter My values are just that: my values. I didn't pull them out of some movie or some book,

then how can you say

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter I do consider Stirner, Nietzsche, and Sartre to be influences of mine (Nietzsche in particular.)...

?

What is ok to pull it from older books or something? If so whats the limit just how old does a book need to be to be valid? Or because you view these sources as valid because they conform to your paradgim?

Or is it just that it lets you project this intelectual front, which you seem to value above all else (perhaps not above not seeming like a pussy tho)?

And try to float above others and the arguments they state?

Also when you say

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter And although I must confess that your silly ramblings have provided me with some amusement, I'm afraid that you are indeed a case study for the type of mental weakness I have so much contempt for."

Realise you are talking to a person who has had reports(non technical reports also) I've written ciculated at division level (that is directors of the company would have read it) of a very major engineering company (one you will definatly know).

I've personally presented to, briefed and had one on one meetings with people in charge of budgets in execess of £300,000,000 (about 550 million US$) a year.

These people valued my opinion to a very high degree. I've been drinking with these people. These are important people now who the fuck are you?

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If you can read this, I'm seriously fucking bored.

It really does seem like we are going around in circles allright....the arrogance of his position is the best bit though....basically we are all wrong and cant provide 1 decent rational arguement....between the lot of us....LOL

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter That is true - as she can be responsible for putting me in a situation where my actions proved the most attractive option. And who can say who or what may be responsible for her disposition to do that? Perhaps it was yet another act of mine? And could we not speculate as to its origins as well? Such analysis doesn't seem very productive to me. Who can truly know all that they may set into motion?

Well, when you messed with her records and her relationship, how could you know that she didn't wind up getting straight As and came out with a stronger and better relationship? You couldn't, but you acted anyway, because the eventual result of your actions could be predicted fairly precisely. When you start to drag out a long line of events, and philosophises on how their cause/effect relationships may be, you are taking things to an absurd level, because the task of predicting effects become harder the longer down the line you are. Thus, the person who did something far down the line cannot be said to have acted in as reckless or ruthless manner as the one who comitted the last act. Further, once the girl was in the situation, you had the possibility to help her out, which it seems that you did not.
Now, I don't know the girl, and wouldn't be surprised to learn that she was/is a bad person, who had it coming. And I don't feel the same loathing of you as some of the other posters in this thread. (I wouldn't have acted as you do, but that's because I don't give a shit about honour.) But if you are to be true to your ideal of honour, then you cannot decline to take part of the responsibility for the suicide (if it happened). The "don't care"-quote and the post I responded to previously gave a fair indication that you are trying to avoid that. Hence my response.

Dervish, since you seem to be strangely obsessed with discussing this topic with me even though I thought I had made it clear that I have no interest in talking to you about it, I'm going to one last time try to explain my point of view with regards to our conversation.

Your first post that you wrote on the topic, as I'm sure you remember, was this:

quote:

Arbiter having read your responce to the worst thing you've done thread, I recon all that stuff about not caring about what people think or needing them or whatever is pretty weak. Why would you care what happened to that girl if you were only bounded by reason? You were exposing yourself to risk by doing it.

I was puzzled by this response because from my point of view "all that stuff about not caring about what people think or needing them or whatever" wasn't really related to my actions that I described in the thread you referred to. This is because it was, and still is, my position that my actions were 100% rational at least insofar - as Epicurus pointed out - as they are the inevitable logical result of adherence to my value system. I tried to clarify this apparent misunderstading, by clarifying my previously stated position and describing the rational basis for my actions:

quote:

You seem to misunderstand. I never made the claim that I don't care what other people think. I do, I simply don't base my actions around it. Additionally, while it is true that I don't need anyone, I fail to see the relevance of my actions in that particular scenario to that assertion. The basis for my actions with regard to the individual in question was reason. Because I was responsible for bringing her into our organization, I was indirectly responsible for her actions as part of our organization as well. As a result, if someone had to be put at risk in order to ensure justice, I was the most rational candidate. Furthermore, as I had previously made the claim that those who were disloyal would be subject to punishment, if I were to fail to back up those threats with action, then my credibility among friends and enemies alike would be damaged.

Your response was this post:

quote:

You know you really almost make it sound resonable to fuck up someones academic if not entire life to save face with your friends. I've seriously lost a great deal of respect for you (which I had alot of actually) on this one, and all this "not needing anyone else" "act on no emotions" stuff too. Seems alot of talk, as lovely as the talk is... Calling someone a traitor for pulling out of being involved with the type of people who would do that seems smart in my opinion. The only dumb thing she did was get involved in the first place.

It was at this point that I began to draw the conclusion that our continued conversation would not be very productive and that perhaps it was simply that your intellect was insufficient to understand my assertions and arguments.

Your first sentence was a straw man (or at least a gross oversimplification) of the reasons I had just explained for my actions. It indicated to me either a failure to understand or a conscious choice to ignore the clarifications I tried to make in my previous post.

The following paragraph was really nothing more than a personal attack which you didn't (and still haven't) justified. Now I don't mind trading barbs as long as it isn't confused with a rational argument, but it's more fun if each person at least provides some basis for their claims.

To conclude your post, you seemed to make an attempt at re-defining the word "traitor" to suit your particular point of view without any clear advantage in terms of clarity or specificity. This is generally not a tactic that intelligent and well-intentioned individuals use while exploring a disagreement.

I responded that based on the information about your reasoning which I had gathered from this thread, I couldn't take your opinions very seriously. This was, unfortunately, the truth - your straw man or continued misinterpretation, your unsupported personal attacks, and your semantic maneuvering seems to me to be indicative of a person lacking more rational tools with which to assert their position.

I also tried to explain my position once again, emphasizing the seperation between emotion and reason which you seemed to be unable to see. And lastly, I called you on your attempt to re-define the term "traitor."

Your response was:

quote:

You can call into question the "low quality of my inferences" all you like but you still sound like a nutter to me. As for saying your actions were "savage, cruel, or merciless" I'm sure you'd like that it'd make you feel strong and not weak which is what I think you fear. I feel sorry for someone who gets to that stage. Critise me or my opinions if you like I don't care, I don't think I can give what you say any real credence anymore atleast on this.

You continued to make no attempt to substantiate your position. Instead, you employed yet another unsupported (albeit comical, IMO) personal attack, a baseless attempt at psychoanalysis (again, refer to Epicurus' post for a good explanation of the inherent futility of what you were attempting), and you called into question whether or not you ought to give what I say credence - which seemed to me to be ironic, since at least I was doing you the favor of trying to explain my position - a favor you seemed unwilling or unable to return.

Since you had invited personal criticism, I replied with insults which were based entirely on conclusions drawn from your posts within this thread. I had hoped that you would correctly interpret my choice to resort to pure ad hominems as a statement that I was no longer interested in trying to debate with you regarding the issue. After all, how could I debate with someone who refuses to provide any reasons or evidence for his claims?

At first it seemed that you had basically gotten the point or had made a similar conclusion about trying to discuss the issue with me (just as good from my standpoint.)

After quite some time, you made this post:

quote:

This is dragging out into a pointless flame war. Which I've really tried to avoid (note: even when critised I didn't perpetuate it, which would have been very easy). then why say (note: I'm commenting on the choice to state, not the validity of, the claim that she killed herself) ? As I've said before I think this is more a case of just big talk rather than unbeliveable malice (which was the way it was initally infered in the origonal post >here<). Can we move on now?

Since you didn't ask any questions without obvious answers, and since you stated your desire to "move on," I didn't respond to your post. In particular, since you had made no apparent attempt to understand my explanations in the past, why would I have wanted to waste my time explaining that particular nuance so that you could disregard my response and draw your own baseless conclusions anyway?

Since apparently it isn't as obvoius to you as it is to me: the reason I included the rumor that she may have killed herself was because I thought people might find it interesting. And judging by this thread and people's reactions to it, I was correct. It isn't some big conspiracy - the rumor (regardless of my skepticism) seemed to be relevant and interesting, so I included it. What's so difficult to understand? If you require additional help understanding this, then please ask whatever questions you have. But please don't simply disregard what I have to say and state baseless alternative hypotheses instead when it was you who posed the question to me in the first place.

When I didn't respond, you tried to press the issue with another post (apparently your desire to move on wasn't particularly genuine):

quote:

Nice side step of what I put before (no doubt your responce will just be an insult as it has to pretty much everything everyone said which you couldn't respond to). Give the way your "ideals are your own" and were then how can you say ? What is ok to pull it from older books or something? If so whats the limit just how old does a book need to be to be valid? Or because you view these sources as valid because they conform to your paradgim? Or is it just that it lets you project this intelectual front, which you seem to value above all else (perhaps not above not seeming like a pussy tho)? And try to float above others and the arguments they state? Also when you say... Realise you are talking to a person who has had reports(non technical reports also) I've written ciculated at division level (that is directors of the company would have read it) of a very major engineering company (one you will definatly know). I've personally presented to, briefed and had one on one meetings with people in charge of budgets in execess of £300,000,000 (about 550 million US$) a year. These people valued my opinion to a very high degree. I've been drinking with these people. These are important people now who the fuck are you?

The inconsistency you are accusing me of is one that I've already addressed earlier in the thread in another context:

quote:

originally posted by Arbiter And you're correct, of course, that my conception of masculinity is indeed based upon society's. That is because the process by which I came to my conception of masculinity began with a critical examination of my pre-existing beliefs and biases. I analyzed each trait which I had previously associated with masculinity and attempted to rationally justify its inclusion. Many traits were very justifiable based on utilitarian principles. Others were not justifiable by any rational means, and as a result I no longer possess those beliefs and opinions. In some cases, new traits were included when they were pointed to logically by the course of the inquiry. And it is precisely by means of this process that my conception of masculinity ceased to be society's and became simply "mine." It was my rational and cognitive faculties which made the determination to retain, add, or remove attributes and behaviors from this conception of masculinity, and therefore the resulting product is inherently personal.

Just as I consciously chose which aspects of my pre-existing conception of masculinity and which to discard, I chose which elements of various philosophies to include in my personal set of values and which to discard. It would be correct to say that both of those factors were "influences" it would be incorrect for me to say that I "pulled my values out of some book." Do you require futher clarification? If so, what in particular is it that you fail to understand?

As for your claims about your position and the respect so-called "important" people have for you: I believe you. However you must recognize, that credibility to people who I know nothing about and a position of influence are poor markers of actual intelligence. The President of the united states is a bonafide grade-F moron, but there are plenty of "important" people who give his statements credence. But none of that matters to me, I don't base my opinions of people on other people's opinions of them. I form my own opinions based on my observations: and what I have observed about you, at least in this thread, leads me to believe that you are unintelligent. Could I be mistaken? Absolutely: your posts in this thread are a very small set of data by which to pass such a judgment. I would honestly like nothing more than for you to show me otherwise, to force me to re-evaluate the conclusions I've drawn about you.

I've put time into writing this, and I've made every attempt to be civil and clear. I've invited you to show me where I erred in my judgments (not tell, show). If you continue to post the same type of responses that you've posted earlier, don't expect any more responses from me. If you choose to engage in a fulfilling discussion instead, then I will be pleased.

This week is a week of exams for me and I've been avoiding doing revision by being on TA.

But now I gotta work. I'll get back to you on this (maybe tommorrow when revision gets dull).

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If you can read this, I'm seriously fucking bored.

Ok I managed to read most of your post above, you do realise that bacsicly every paragraph has an insult directed at me in it? Does that tell you something (is thats a good way to explore the issue in the highly formalised method you seem to enjoy?)?

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter perhaps it was simply that your intellect was insufficient

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter It indicated to me either a failure to understand

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter This is generally not a tactic that intelligent and well-intentioned individuals

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter I couldn't take your opinions very seriously.

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter continued misinterpretation

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter another unsupported (albeit comical, IMO) personal attack, a baseless attempt at psychoanalysis

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter I replied with insults

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter After quite some time, you made this post:

making out I had to think about it or give up?

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter why would I have wanted to waste my time explaining

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter What's so difficult to understand? If you require additional help understanding this, then please ask

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter When I didn't respond, you tried to press the issue with another post (apparently your desire to move on wasn't particularly genuine):

I'm thinking at this point why should I keep reading but I did...

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter Do you require futher clarification? If so, what in particular is it that you fail to understand?

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter and what I have observed about you, at least in this thread, leads me to believe that you are unintelligent.

quote:

Originally posted by Arbiter I've put time into writing this, and I've made every attempt to be civil and clear.

<<< yeah.... right

Thats from one post mate, nice ....

Yes before I did bitch about how harsh what you did was because you, for some reason (don't bother saying it was to be interesting either) made out that the girl possibly commited suicide because of you.

Myself and some long term members of the forum reacted in a similar way, perhaps I didn't veil my comments so well but I don't play with my words.

I had a "friend" of mine hack into my email account once. Needless to say I and many others don't speak to him anymore. And I saw your actions as a displaying similar traits to his.

Every reply you gave 1) never gave any answers 2) insulted me and others and had requests for "justification" when I stated in the post why I felt that way.

I don't want to drag this out but all you seem to have done is try to save face for some pretty weird IMHO views and actions. Ones I personally wouldn't want to have any involment with thats my justification.

(man I hate insomnia btw, got a fucking exam today and it's 2.10am and I'm up.... )

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If you can read this, I'm seriously fucking bored.

Unfortunately, it seems the conclusions I had drawn were indeed accurate. I had hoped that you would prove me wrong, but you just had to go and prove me right. Silence would have been a greater credit to you.