Re: OT: "We're not treating this as a terrorist attack"

On 6/01/2025 4:35 am, john larkin wrote:

On Sun, 5 Jan 2025 12:04:46 -0500, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:
 

On 1/5/2025 11:26 AM, john larkin wrote:

On Sun, 5 Jan 2025 11:09:12 -0500, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:
>

On 1/5/2025 11:01 AM, john larkin wrote:
>

Deplorable is is deplorable does, man. What am I supposed to tell people
who think violent crime "is way up" when it's been going down for 50
years and that children are regularly getting sex changes, or whatever
nonsense some significant fraction of citizens choose to believe today.
"Yeah, you're right?"
>
Plenty of very well-to-do people seem to believe the same nonsense, so
it's not really a class-thing.

>
You invent people as targets for your need for contempt. You would
have been an ardent Nazi in the 1930's Germany. Tribal.
>

>
'Fraid people who believe nonsense of the type I mentioned are not at
all "invented", if you don't personally know any or have never met any
maybe it's cuz you live in one of the most leftist places on Earth? ???

>
Humans are incredibly diverse.  You blame and mock (and imagine)
people who have different opinions than yours.

>
It's not about opinions like, what ice cream flavor is best or whether
it's better to like golf or basketball. Trump built a political empire
peddling fear of marginalized people and I think it's a particular
tactic worth mocking, yes. Pretty disingenuous to shift the goalpoasts
to some broad fashion of intolerance that's not the real issue, you know
what this is about..
>

I think this intolerant diversity is evolved, naturally selected, as a
tribal survival mechanism. Probably your intolerance is genetic,
inherited; you can't help yourself.
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This tribal tendency for intolerance is why we have wars.

>
Perhaps your tendency to like flattery is inherited, you can't help
yourself.

 You are copying me and cloning Sloman.  Neither is difficult nor
original.

Being rude about your appetite for flattery is entirely unoriginal. John Fields noticed it early on. It's difficult to miss. This isn't an argument for not mentioning it from time to time.

I dislike flattery; I find it embarassing. My employees know that I
don't like a bunch of public praise, as many CEOs get.
 

Sounds kind of like you're blaming me for the existence of war
which could be considered flattering in a certain light but I'll have to
demure on that one. I don't think I have such power, my dastardly
leftist genes or whatever aren't up to the task.

 I'm blaming tribalism, and intolerance is a big part of tribalism. As
is racism. And professional sports. And music.
 

You are emotionally driven to believe that you are always right. That
attitude, emotionally selective blindness and hostility to ideas, is
toxic to electronic design. I guess that's why so few people are good
at it.
>

>
That's true, I even miss Jim Thompson from time to time. He was better
at it than you

 He was creative but digital-phobic, which is another irrational
intolerance. Code is a great way to do advanced signal processing
cheap. But Jim and I did different things so it's hard to compare.
 People are different.
 But you can't know much about what I design, because I don't post the
best stuff.

And nobody else make as fuss about it either. It doesn't seem to be all that good - good enough to sell to people who want bespoke electronic design that conforms to their daffy prejudices. When I got stuck with doing that kind of work at Nijmegen University, most of my time was devoted to persuading people that they buy something quite good enough off the shelf. There were some exceptions, but not all that many.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney