Todd Archer wrote:
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> Y'know, Lou, this is the second time in I think as many days when you've set up a straw man and savaged it (the first being your "ladder").
I didn't get that impression from the ladder post, but that is secondary here.
May your argumentation skills improve as you practice them here.
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> Rob didn't say, nor did he seem to intimate, that he was an out-and-out sexist pig, leering at women to demonstrate his superiority as a male member of the species. He looked a little thick, granted, but what can seem like stupidity can be simple uncertainty. [clip]
Granted, Lou may have built too strong a rhetoric on too weak a foundation, but his forcefulness does have a foundation in one implication of the whole of Rob's posts on this topic. Rob lays claim to "understanding." That kind of claim, in a number of areas, can legitimately trigger fireworks. I imagine, for example, that Marta would quite reasonably throw a very large fit if I told her, on the basis of my broken hip of 1990 and my broken wrist of 2001, that I "understood what it felt like to be disabled."
At meetings of the local Depressive and Manic Depressive Support Group, when new persons show up, we will spend some time discussing what the group "does for" members. A core point we will make is the usefulness of spending two or three hours a month in a context where no one will say stupid things to you. And one of our prime examples of intolerably stupid things is any version of the statement, "I understand how you feel."
I rather suspect that had Rob not allowed this implicatiion of "I understand how you feel" to show through his posts, his clumsinesses might have been handled more leniently by all concerned.
Carrol