mentalgymnast wrote:Res Ipsa wrote:On the other hand, it seems to me like he does a ton of over explaining himself. I recognize that because I do it too. Look at any of my threads explaining why I said something. Is it a sign of over-inflated self importance or a sign of insecurity? I'm pretty sure I know which it is in myself. Not sure about him.
It's more or less because I think I'm being either misinterpreted at times, so I try to straighten things out. At other times I believe that I have been intentionally taken out of context...so that a false narrative ensues, or a strawman has been created. So I make/made it known.
It would be wonderful to NOT to continually either repeat myself and/or try to clarify what has either been intentionally misinterpreted. Granted, there are times when I have not been as clear/precise as I could have been. But I think even the best and most articulate of us may run into that problem at times.
Regards,
MG
See, I read that last bit and the first thought I have is, if it would be wonderful, why not stop? You don't have to do any of it. You choose to. Ask yourself, why do I choose to? And the answer can't be "because some other person said such and such." That doesn't answer the question.
Look, when I'm actively posting here, someone misunderstands me several times a day. And vice versa. It's the nature of the beast. Or I'm a lousy communicator. Go back over my stuff and look how often I say: "I'm sorry, that's not what I meant. Or "that's not what I meant to say." Or "what I was trying to say was." It happens, and it happens on message boards frequently because we can't give the types of nonverbal cues that help us communicate more clearly. I see accusations of deliberate distortion flung around here all the time, and my opinion is that 99% of them are BS. In almost every case, if you sit back, take a breath, and read the whole conversation with an eye toward trying to figure out why someone characterized what you said the way they did, you can see how it happened and it has nothing to do with deliberate misrepresentation. In fact, in my Choo Choo post, I was tempted to single out "you misrepresented me" as a classic example of a substance to meta derail.
(That's right folks, you can view Res Ipsa's classic post "Choo Choo Crash" absolutely free by going to the Paradise Forum and looking for the title. The first 100 clickers will receive a bonus gift: the timeless collection of posts called "Rambling crap Res Ipsa posts. Don't wait. This is a time limited offer. Oops, to late. Your loss.)
Point is, most of your explanations sound like lengthy justifications for why whatever the kerfuffle is is due to someone else's choices. If you go back and look, do you see that?
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951