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Chippewa
SFN Regular
USA
1496 Posts |
 Posted - 01/12/2008 : 02:42:57 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
Marf...comments like yours above are disingenuous in the extreme - poorly concealed insult - and bespeak a adolescent lack of sophistication as to an understanding of any style of humor! And if you continue to direct such childish prattle to me, I most certainly will ask you to justify it with reference to the subject matter you object to, and why! |
This from the person who wrote:
Originally posted by bngbuck
...Chippewa, Chaloobi, Iroquois or Hopi; you red guys all look and sound alike, not like all us white guys! Brown guys and little green guys are pretty hard to distinguish one from another, too! More evidence of our white, Aryan superiority! Sorry to have typed Chaloobi whilst thinking Chippewa!
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"Poorly concealed insult" and "adolescent lack of sophistication" indeed!
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Diversity, independence, innovation and imagination are progressive concepts ultimately alien to the conservative mind.
"TAX AND SPEND" IS GOOD! (TAX: Wealthy corporations who won't go poor even after taxes. SPEND: On public works programs, education, the environment, improvements.) |
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bngbuck
SFN Addict
USA
2437 Posts |
Posted - 01/12/2008 : 03:27:10 [Permalink]
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Chippewa.....
Do you actually believe I was directing an ethnic slur toward Native Americans, Hawaiians, Filipinos, Indonesians, Extraterrestrial Aliens, Anglo Saxons; or any race, ethnicity, skin color or national or planetary origin? And more, that I consider myself or anyone else a superior color such as White, or an Ayran; whatever the hell that might be, but most certainly is absolutely nothing but a self-deprecatory epithet designating the kind of mindless crap that Hitler used to spout in Mein Kampf and the other imbecilic rants of his that I heard mention of and read in the newspapers when I was a teenager in the forties! So you think I am a racist? Well, you're going to have to work pretty damn hard to make that one stick.
Also, if you agree with Marf that the fun that I was making of the Kandinski / B-17 connection was mean-spirited, you are just plain wrong! That is preposterous PC nonsense, and does not befit anyone clever and bright enough to post the excellent and thoughtful images identifying the origins of the industrial design revolution that swept this country in the thirties and forties and is still evident in the design of much of today's technology! Get off of it Chippewa and if you are offended by my funning Kandinski, go to Marf's aid, she needs it!
And btw, Chippewa, I have no idea of what your ethnicity is, nor do I care! Nor do I know or care to know of ANYONE'S skin color or self-understood ethnic differentiation in SFN. I myself am fourth generation one sixteenth Native American on my mother's side. So what?! I don't flaunt it or conceal it, I forget about it. But you would have to work pretty damn hard to make me mad about it, even if I was full blooded Navajo!
My wife (don't ask) and I have many Navajo and especially Hopi friends and very distant relatives on the Big Reservation (The Hopi rez is in the middle of the Navajo) in Arizona and New Mexico, and we visit and stay with them annually during Indian Market in Santa Fe in August of each year.
My very close fifty-years long friend Victor Beck was a Navajo tribal official for many years, and I always call him and his wife "racists" because they put me down jokingly for being a "Diluted Indian". Victor is a jewelry artist and has won many tribal, national and international prizes for his work. My wife and I have a collection of Victor's jewelry, Hopi Kachinas, Navajo rugs, and Santa Clara and San Ildefonso pottery that we have assembled for over forty years that fills two rooms in our house. We have literally dozens of close friends in the Southwest Indian lands of NM and AZ. So if I am a racist, Chippewa so are Russell Means and Buffy Sainte-Marie! |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 01/12/2008 : 23:47:42 [Permalink]
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I get it! The all-caps and underlined "shut up" and the "some of my friends are Native Americans" rant are deep irony.
Please tell me I'm right, Bill. Please, please, please! |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2008 : 00:24:29 [Permalink]
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No one still reads bngbuck's posts, do they? Not really worth the effort, imo.
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
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marfknox
SFN Die Hard
USA
3739 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2008 : 07:10:01 [Permalink]
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It is idiotic to take a dictionary and simply replace the original words in a sentence with synonyms used to define the word. For an example:
The situation is made worse by an easily avoided misunderstanding.
worse: diminish, decay
easily: simply, certainly
misunderstanding: wrong idea, argument
The situation is made diminish by a simply avoided wrong idea.
OR
The situation is made decay by a certainly avoided argument.
Do these two mean exactly the same thing as the first sentence? Do they even make all that much sense? Obviously I just choice synonyms to maximize the absurdity of the sentence, while you used them to maximize insult. I chose the words that I used quite carefully, and it is a distortion to take those words, replace them with others, and then say I wrote this thing I did not write.
You have asked me to clarify this comment: | I also find much of your sense of humor when you talk about Kandinsky and his relationship to the events of WWII unjustly crass and demeaning. |
And here is your original comment about Kandinsky that was meant to be humor: | Besides, a little known fact of Kandinski's later life, was that he was a B-17 pilot in the US Army Air Corps force in his dotage. Mercenary, of course! Made a number of bombing runs over Germany in 1944 near the end of WWII. He was the oldest Air Corps pilot flying at that time, being 77 at the time. Angry at the Nazis for raiding his house and closing Bauhaus in 1932, he produced a gropious quantity of work while waiting for the war to start and Boeing to invent the B-17. He also learned how to fly, which was useful when he joined the Air Corps at 75. |
Here are my objections:
You say this was meant as a "ridiculous spoof". It does not fly. I have a Masters in Fine Art and have taught children about Kandinsky's art several times, and when I first read this paragraph, I took it to be meant seriously, so I scrunched up my face and went "Huh?" I didn't actually know that Kandinsky lived out the rest of his life in France, and many European artists did move to the USA to escape the Nazis, so the first thing I did was look up info, and quickly realize that you were either misinformed or just telling a really bad joke that almost nobody would get.
So you mean this as a joke, but a spoof is not arbitrarily designed. This and your later questions and comments about Bauhaus members and their influence on industrial engineers makes it seem as if you are drawing a direct connection between these artists and machines. That's fine and I agree with some of that connection. But with the paragraph on Kandinsky, your spoof seems to attempt to share the hidden truth that Kandinsky's art is directly connected to murderous revenge through instruments of war.
To sum-up, I object for two reasons: First, the way you wrote the paragraph looked serious and I think most people would just take it for real information, and that misinforms people about Kandinsky. Second, even when people do get it as a spoof, it paints Kandinsky and angry and bitter and suggests that his rage and desire for revenge came through in his work.
That clear enough for you?
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"Too much certainty and clarity could lead to cruel intolerance" -Karen Armstrong
Check out my art store: http://www.marfknox.etsy.com
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| Edited by - marfknox on 01/13/2008 07:12:25 |
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marfknox
SFN Die Hard
USA
3739 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2008 : 07:31:18 [Permalink]
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bngbuck wrote: | And please don't go whining to a higher power how mistreated you are, because comments like yours above are disingenuous in the extreme - poorly concealed insult - and bespeak a adolescent lack of sophistication as to an understanding of any style of humor! And if you continue to direct such childish prattle to me, I most certainly will ask you to justify it with reference to the subject matter you object to, and why! |
What is hidden in my comments? They aren't a personal insult. All I said was that I have disagreements and objections to something you wrote. Whether or not you intended what you wrote about Kandinsky to come across that way is irrelevant, that's how it came across to me, so I'm saying so. What is the hidden element?
If you haven't noticed, you write many things on this forum that you claim you don't mean to be offensive, annoying, or distracting, but which are taken that way. Ever since you first came this to forum, you have been making comments about peoples' avatars, usernames, and aspects of their selves which are irrelevant to the conversations on this forum, such as race, age, and gender. Knowing that this derails the conversation for many, why do you persist in calling attention to these things, especially doing it when you are in the middle of a debate with someone? Are you unaware that this will be viewed as a shifty tactic; you just trying to rile people up so that they will be thrown off track in a debate?
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"Too much certainty and clarity could lead to cruel intolerance" -Karen Armstrong
Check out my art store: http://www.marfknox.etsy.com
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2008 : 09:51:20 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
Chaloobi.....
Chippewa, Chaloobi, Iroquois or Hopi; you red guys all look and sound alike, not like all us white guys! Brown guys and little green guys are pretty hard to distinguish one from another, too! More evidence of our white, Aryan superiority!
Sorry to have typed Chaloobi whilst thinking Chippewa!
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Oh. That's good to know. I thought you'd either written this incredibly sophisticated response that went way the hell over my head or you wrote a mockery of my discussion with Marf so dry and deadpan that, again, it went beyond my limited brain. In any case I'm feeling much relieved that it was just a simple mistake. |
-Chaloobi
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bngbuck
SFN Addict
USA
2437 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2008 : 13:06:18 [Permalink]
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Chaloobi.....
Not just a simple mistake, a stupid and careless mistake. I am a writer, and as such, am trained to proof, check, and correct my work before publication. In this case, that means before hitting "Submit Reply".
I carefully checked that post for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and logical sequence. Not for addressee! It's like letting a book get published with the wrong title on the dust cover! It was stupid!
BTW, your brain is a lot less limited than some, Chaloobi. It sounds to me as though it is working pretty well indeed! |
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bngbuck
SFN Addict
USA
2437 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2008 : 13:14:00 [Permalink]
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Dave.....
I get it! The all-caps and underlined "shut up" and the "some of my friends are Native Americans" rant are deep irony.
Please tell me I'm right, Bill. Please, please, please! |
You're wrong, wrong, wrong, Dave! Sorry, sorry, sorry!
It would take a racist mentality to either suggest such a thing or to insult my limited, but real heritage. |
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bngbuck
SFN Addict
USA
2437 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2008 : 14:41:17 [Permalink]
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Humbert.....
| No one still reads bngbuck's posts, do they? Not really worth the effort, imo. |
Well, let's see. In single threads, I have had the following reads in five months:
Humor................764 read one thread
General..............367 read one thread
Astronomy........3584 read one thread
Astronomy........3668 read one thread
General..............552 read one thread
Politics...............923 read one thread
plus a number of bombs that got very little attention.
That's 9858 reads off of six threads. Maybe that is "nobody", relatively speaking. I haven't been here long enough to have a good sense of what the average readership of a thread, (or certainly a post), is. However, I would wager that Dave would have those statistics at the stroke of a key or two.
How about it Dave? Relatively speaking, or compared to the average poster, does practically no one read my threads? I have no idea if you can discern how many people are reading a given member's total responses or total posts, I doubt that is possible; but if you have computer legerdemain to answer Humbert's question directly, I would be fascinated to hear it, and it would respond to Humbert's question far more accurately than I can guess!
Humbert, I would like to say that I have no idea how many read your posts, but I personally consider your and Dude's the two best, well-informed and carefully thought out opinions on these SFN forums.
Generally, when either of you have something to say, you say it well and it deserves attention! If you don't have readership, you certainly should - far more than some of the irrevelant nonsense that appears here from time to time! SFN needs more intelligent posters like yourself!
If Humbert is right, I would like to do a poll to see if anyone is reading my posts. If very few are, I will sure as hell pack up and go home, as I certainly don't need the practice! I write an average of twelve hours a day the way it is.
However, I receive far more than I give here at SFN, and I could lurk for that without the time and effort of contribution. I do it for fun, mostly, and if very few are either laughing with or laughing at me, it obviously isn't worth the effort! Let's find out! |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2008 : 21:39:24 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
You're wrong, wrong, wrong, Dave! Sorry, sorry, sorry! |
That's a damn shame.| It would take a racist mentality to either suggest such a thing or to insult my limited, but real heritage. |
Do you have any idea why I hoped that you were being ironic? |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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bngbuck
SFN Addict
USA
2437 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2008 : 02:14:09 [Permalink]
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It is a shame for you to be wrong, but we all are from time to time! Don't worry about it!
Dave, I have no idea why you write many of the things you post on these boards, your clumsy encounter with Dude being the most recent.
As to irony, it is a difficult shading to cast when the persons one is addressing does not understand simple satirical invention or blunt response to insult! Chippewa's contrived "racist" comment was just plain blind, how could I slur his ethnicity when I had no idea what that ethnicity was? My Indian bloodline is sufficient to become a tribal member, I never saw any use in doing so. But why the hell would I seriously diss Native Americans? And little green aliens? This is PC gone mad. That degree of sensitivity is affected, not genuine!
As far as the blunt response to Marf is concerned, far from ironic, it was the most direct answer I could muster. I fail to see how you could associate that rebuttal with irony. She made what appeared to me as a preposterous and insulting comment concerning my making an "unjust, crass, and demeaning" statement about Wassily Kandinski, (an artist whom I have absolutely no reason to demean, nor did I) because she has no discernable sense of humor!| your spoof seems to attempt to share the hidden truth that Kandinsky's art is directly connected to murderous revenge through instruments of war. |
Kee Ryst! What a load of horsecrap! And when called on it, she certainly didn't justify using those words or even clearly explain what drove her to make such an comment.
| Do you have any idea why I hoped that you were being ironic? |
Dave I am perceptive, but not psychic. I really don't believe in mind reading, anymore than you do. How could I possibly discern what you "hope" for, particularly concerning my opinions? Is part of your job as Editor, et al, here to "hope" for specifically complected opinions from specific members? And even if you spelled it out in big black letters, why would that delineation be of any use to me? Little that I say here is of much use to anyone else, it is opinion, and cannot be expected to change, or probably even sway, others. The hopes of others may be interesting, but I don't solicit their expression.
On another subject, is it possible to easily determine the average reads (and responses) for a given time period, across all the boards? By easily, I mean without adding up great columns of figures manually. Will the software you use to power SFN deliver that kind of information without extensive programming?
I think Humbert raises an interesting question as to which members' threads are read, and which are not. Because of the discussion that evolves within a given topic after introduction, I would imagine it becomes very difficult to ascertain whose posts are being read within each thread and whose are not.
Has anyone ever done a poll to answer those kind of questions, or is that perhaps not allowed or not good netiquette? If your software allowed for a fairly sophisticated spread of response choices, psychometric techniques might be able to be used to define and describe the active group of posters on these forums, how opinion topics compare in popularity with each other, some measure of the perceived value of various poster's contributions, a pretty good guess as to the popularity ratings of various posters, and the like.
Probably way too much information for anyone's good, administrator or member, but at least it could quantify answers to questions like Humbert's. Many would be interested in the statistics but probably would shy from published data revelatory of their own rankings, and this in itself would probably preclude any such investigation here.
It might make for an interesting thread, tho'!
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Chippewa
SFN Regular
USA
1496 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2008 : 03:51:00 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
...Chippewa's contrived "racist" comment was just plain blind, how could I slur his ethnicity when I had no idea what that ethnicity was?
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Maybe because I use the name "Chippewa" - you might assume there's some reason for me to use it. But even if I wasn't Chippewa, your post was still pompously racist to Native North Americans.
I understood right away that your Kandinski WWII bomber story was meant as a joke but the response also showed that you're likely unaware as to why I linked to both his painting and an airplane in the original context of a thread you started. So the joke without a question or any follow-up became a put-down as well. It also showed that you don't know why I did that or never thought of asking why.
Having directed comedy films years ago, I'm well aware of and appreciate a good laugh. Humor can insult pomposity without being insulting to your audience. Have a look at the masters such as the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy sometime. Other than this I have little more to say to you. I wish you well. Have a nice day.
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Diversity, independence, innovation and imagination are progressive concepts ultimately alien to the conservative mind.
"TAX AND SPEND" IS GOOD! (TAX: Wealthy corporations who won't go poor even after taxes. SPEND: On public works programs, education, the environment, improvements.) |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2008 : 07:37:01 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
Dave, I have no idea why you write many of the things you post on these boards... |
And after reading a bunch more, I get the impression you don't care, either. That's fine, but could have been said with many fewer words.| I think Humbert raises an interesting question as to which members' threads are read... |
Actually, he said "posts," not "threads," and without getting into the vagarities of Snitz vocabulary, the simplest questions you've raised are impossible to answer.
Take this page, for example. I just looked at it again, adding one "view" to the total, but I didn't actually re-read any of the posts on it. On that page are messages from you (2), Cuneiformist (2), H. Humbert (2), chaloobi (5), BigPapaSmurf (1) and marfknox (3). Who gets extra credit for having their post(s) read, even though I read none of them?
Heck, when I finish writing this post, if I allow the software to automatically redisplay the page I was on (which it will do in two seconds unless I navigate somewhere else), it will click up another view for this whole thread. As it would if I were looking at the last page and click "refresh" on my browser to see if anyone has posted anything new since I last looked.
For similar reasons, this thread, with only 75 replies, has 42,160 views (as of this writing) because it is the number-one Google Image result for a search on "Hitler." Go figure.| Has anyone ever done a poll to answer those kind of questions, or is that perhaps not allowed or not good netiquette? If your software allowed for a fairly sophisticated spread of response choices, psychometric techniques might be able to be used to define and describe the active group of posters on these forums, how opinion topics compare in popularity with each other, some measure of the perceived value of various poster's contributions, a pretty good guess as to the popularity ratings of various posters, and the like. |
All of those things necessarily change over time. Any poll results would be valid for maybe a month or two. So it's not that it's not allowed or poor netiquette, it's that it's impractical to try to measure such ephemeral things.
As far as the "active group of posters" goes, however, there's no reason to think that old Usenet rules-of-thumb are broken. Go to the Member List and click on "Last Post" to sort the list by date of last postings. If you want to see the "active users" for the last week, simply count back that far. It's the 14th today, and by going to page three of the list, we can see that there have been 33 members who've posted since the 8th. If you were to copy that list of names and save it, and then re-generate the list a month from now, you could apply the Lincoln-Petersen method and get a better estimate of active users.
And then whatever number you end up with, on Usenet you'd generally multiply it by ten to find a rough estimate of the number of lurkers, but we need not be so loose here. If you check out any issue of the Summary, you'll see the number of visitors (excluding Web-bots) we got. In that case, we averaged about 1,087 visitors per day, so our total-visitors-to-active-posters ratio is closer to 30-to-1, due in no small part to Google hitting so hard on Hitler, Coulter and snake photos for us. (Why us? No idea.) |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2008 : 08:02:47 [Permalink]
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Because Coulter and Hitler are snakes? Or maybe its just Filthy's fault.
On the new subject, I only read about half of the active topics, I skim the rest for anything I might find interesting. Then you have to account for half of the posts having nothing to do with the original topic as well. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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Are the Humanities of any Value, really?
