Comment on Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 18:12:01 GMT

What if, instead of trying to win, you're actually trying to advance the discussion in a meaningful way?

I didn't define "win" as winning at verbal sparring. If your goal is to advance discussion in a meaningful way and the short version fails at that while the long version is too long, the same reasoning applies.

Like, you could, for example, cut down on stuff like this.

But I don't wanna! X-) I like expressive, sparkly, prickly, highly saturated, slightly ambiguous language. I can easily produce polite, bland, dry, and technically correct writing, but there is not much fun in that and I'm not writing an academic paper. "Tone it down to beige" -- no, thank you.

This... seriously does not follow.

I am not talking about myself. I'm talking about the balance between discouraging and promoting in general. I certainly don't claim I'm the only force that's keeping LW from drowning in crap.

you're a species of one

There is the classic Shrek's answer to Fiona's outraged "What kind of knight ARE you?"...

But really, are you telling me, on LW, that I'm too weird? :-)

What are you even arguing, here?

That applying a single standard of expected behaviour to everyone is not a particularly useful approach, but rather a "be careful what you wish for" case.

Discuss