One more thing. You seemingly dislike my choice of words and metaphors to create a dramatic effect, but you would probably agree that if I did not use such attention grabbing literary devices, what I post would be largely ignored. How is this different from the practices of the popular counterculture that seem to be in high esteem on this list? Can punk rockers or rappers use attention grabbing epithets but I cannot?
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Punk rockers and rappers are entertainers, this is a listserv.
The listserv mode of discussion and debate is often very useful but easily de-railed. It is, to borrow a phrase from my software engineering friends, a 'brittle system', it doesn't fail gracefully.
When it fails, we experience signal to noise ratio problems.
Using inflammatory rhetoric doesn't draw attention to your ideas, it draws attention to you; responders focus on analyzing your motivations and behaviors instead of whatever you believe your argument to be.
If we were sitting in a pub - listening to voices, watching facial expressions, receiving time honored non-verbal cues - perhaps the arched eyebrow you claim to be deploying might be obvious and your "people are sheep" assertion might seem less outrageous.
But of course, we're sitting at our keyboards, typing away while doing many other things; nuance is extraordinarily difficult to discern.
I suggest less rock star textual pyrotechnics in favor of a more streamlined prose. Hemingway and Kafka come to mind as models.
.d.
--------- She loves penicillin...and compromise. She's going to go for it
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/