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shopping – Emotional blackmail is when you try and use a person’s emotions against them in order to achieve a goal. You used your being upset as an integral part of a discussion in order to make the other party (SelichosGnendel/yekke2) feel bad and come round to your side of the argument, despite the fact that they may or may not have a valid point. You ignored the point and simply said “You’re being mean and I’m upset, so you’d better be nice to me and take back what you’ve said or I’ll leave”. In other words, you used your emotions, and thus theirs too, as a bargaining chip. Whether you did this deliberately or not I don’t know (and will have to assume not as this is what you have claimed) but it is what you did.
Just one small point though. You left because you felt people were being inconsiderate yet on your very first post back you insulted someone for nothing more than being male (and I have a feeling that littlefishy is actually female anyway):
ya, let me guess, you are a boy who does not understand self-estteem, having good relashenshipz, and do not have sensitive feelings like girls.
I hope you understand that boys understand both self-esteem and good relationships and also that they most definitely do have sensitive feelings. Boys are, after all, humans too.
Sam2 – I disagree with rd as much as you do but I’m surprised at your method of expressing your disagreement. You’re usually a lot more respectful than that…
WIY – I have never seen an adam chashuv that doesnt raise his voice by davening
I’ve never seen one who does, and I had the zechus of sitting almost directly behind the hanholo when I was in Gateshead Yeshiva. I’ve seen R’ Nosson Tzvi ztz”l daven too and he never raised his voice. Same with R’ Yaakov Hillel and R’ Chaim Kanievsky. In fact you may wish to check your Mishnah Berurah (95, 5) who says that it is ossur to raise one’s voice during davening.
Syag – First of all, the ability to criticise in the correct manner is very much a positive trait. Secondly what I meant was I don’t discriminate in when I do point out to people that perhaps they wrote or did something incorrect, not that I try to criticise at every possible opportunity. It was in response to your claim that certain other posters “get away with it”, to which I replied that I try my best not to let them. Nothing more was intended. Sorry if you misunderstood.
oneoutofthree – It was a contribution to the Discworld reference game, being that “one out of three ain’t bad” is a quote from a book from the series (to whit, Soul Music).
Syag – I know what OP stands for, but it was by playtime hence my point.
playtime – No I wasn’t trying to connect anything to anything. That was the point. I know the Henry story wasn’t true; I think I mentioned several times that you made it up. Which, again, was my point.
BTW, thanks for all the sarcasm.
playtime – A few points.
1. Never refer to yourself in the third person. You say I “proved the OP’s point” when you yourself are the OP. I know you probably didn’t mean it this way but referring to yourself in the third person can come across as a bit self-centred.
2. Actually the point disproves itself, and that is what I was showing. Saying “we just don’t know” opens itself up to infinite possibilities and so to assume any one of them because “we just don’t know” is pointless and logically incorrect as 3 will show.
3. There is a little thing in mathematics called “probability”. It means that out of the infinite “we just don’t know”s we can say that some are more likely than others. This is always contextual, I.e. given the information we have at hand we can say that, for example, it is unlikely that anyone who posts on the CR is a Zen Buddhist. Of course “we just don’t know” for sure (in an anonymous environment anyone could be anyone or, indeed, anything) but it is highly improbable. Although almost everyone here in the CR is anonymous it is quite easy to get a fairly good idea of people’s character, background etc. In other words we don’t know but we can guess quite accurately.
4. In your story gufa, if Henry is on the chat room to ease his loneliness presumably he has made his life-story known to others on that chat room (otherwise the object of the exercise is defeated) making it highly unlikely that the people there “just don’t know”. In other words, you cannot simply make a crude representation of a story and put it in front of us and say “here, look at this because it shows I’m right” when in fact all it really shows is that you wrote a story.
Syag’ – I try my best to criticise anyone who I feel is out of order.
To continue Syag’s story…
Shortly afterwards Buddy met Glod Glodsson and Lias Bluestone and went out and made Music with Rocks In.
Syag – And playtime’s premise was correct?!It’s called a hypothetical situation and it’s my hypothetical situation so I can write it however I see fit. My point was exactly that, you can’t go around making up stories to try and make a point because they are entirely arbitrary and can only say the thing you want them to say. So playtime’s story ended badly because he wanted it to and mine ended well because I wanted it to.
Hi Joseph!
An in-joke for the Discworlders: oneoutofthree ain’t bad…
playtime – Bob was a 14 year old boy who was bored once. He had a family, people in his class that he could be socialising with, hobbies with which he could occupy himself with. Instead he bought himself a laptop and, to assuage his boredom, he started to surf the web. He found a chat room and starting posting. Some of what he posted was fine but some of it was simply “hello, I’m bored”. He started to realise that a lot of the time when he said ‘I’m bored’ no-one would bother to reply. He started a club on the chat room but didn’t realise that it wasn’t necessarily something people would be interested in. Nevertheless he pushed the club in people’s faces at every opportunity to try and get people to join. Soon this became a little bit annoying. One day someone told him that it had become a little bit annoying and that maybe he could find some more constructive uses for some of his time. He thought about it and went out to meet up with some guys from his class who he found were actually quite cool and interesting people to be around. He picked up some of his old hobbies and realised that they were fun and useful. He even put a bit of time aside each day to just sit and meditate. After a few months he realised that he was now a more accomplished and emotionally stable person with a social life, interests and skills and that his relationship with his family had improved measurably.
This isn’t true. But it could be.
See, I can do it too.
P.S. I know it happens in stories a lot, but you can’t actually die from getting too upset.
OOM – I’m in a really strange place here because, for once, I disagree with you. I think you’re going in too hard on SelichosGenendel and are effectively doing to her what you accuse her of doing to shopping. At no point did she intimate that she felt it would be better if shopping left (your diyukim are another matter entirely), simply that she felt that shopping was often posting for the sake of putting something ‘out there’ and that this was occurring on a far-too-frequent basis. Yes, her wording may not have been the best but from reading her post (and I’ve done that 4 or 5 times now) it does appear as if she was trying her best to put forward constructive criticism in what she thought was the nicest possible way. And I think the whole ‘most people in the CR’ thing has been blown out of all proportion too. It has been interpreted as ‘most people wanted shopping to leave’, which isn’t true and wasn’t the claim. The claim was that most people here thought that maybe shopping would want to cut back a little on her frequency of posting and also on her obsession with SUC, a claim which may have some merit (though in absence of a poll I have no idea if it is or isn’t correct).
As far as shopping’s response, I have to agree with ubiquitin and SelichosGenendel. It may sometimes hurt to be told that what you’re doing is incorrect or harmful but those telling you are not being ‘mean’ or ‘nasty’, and not all of your feelings need ‘validating’. Sometimes you’re wrong. This modern obsession with not being able to criticise because ‘you’re going to hurt their feelings’ is counter-productive – if you cannot tell someone that their behaviour is inappropriate for fear of being called ‘nasty’ then the person will never improve. To use emotional blackmail like shopping did, whilst it is a classic teenager’s response, simply exacerbates the situation as both sides then dig themselves into a corner. The party in the wrong views themselves as being more and more victimised and the party who is trying to help becomes more and more frustrated and what started as a rational criticism becomes an emotional ‘telling off’. It becomes a vicious cycle.
bladiblah – There was no cyber-bullying going on here, not sure why you brought it in.
&U
Ken Zayn – You’re a Manc?
WIY – There is a huge difference between a making a slip-up (in this case the unintentional missing “of”) and continued abuse, misuse and non-use of spelling, punctuation and basic grammar. haifagirl did the former; those she is trying to educate are guilty of the latter.
The Mashgiach in one of the yeshivos I went too (can’t say which but it’s a biggie) once told me that he is actually two Mashgichim – the ‘PR’ Mashgiach and the personal Mashgiach. The ‘PR’ Mashgiach gets up and gives shmusen on staying in learning, the personal one tells individual bochurim, in private, what he thinks they should be doing. He told me that I would be surprised at how many bochurim he’s told to go to university and even more surprised at who these bochurim were. Having said all that, he did once give a series of shmussen on business ethics and chemdas hamomon which he prefaces with a statement along the lines of “whilst many boys here will be surprised at me giving these shmussen the truth is that maybe 5 or 10 bochurim in this room are ra’ui for staying in learning long term. Everyone else needs to know how to do work when they get there.” Those weren’t his exact words, I know (it’s coming on for 6 years since I heard the smooze…) but it’s a pretty fair representation of them…
No, this is my first daf cycle. I’ve done Pesachim 4 times by itself and so this (my first with daf) will be the 5th time overall.
Not the pie, the trick. One trick leads to another as the saying goes…
GAW – As long as you’re not using the ginger beer trick on the guy at the same time…
Finished! And now for Pesachim again… It’s my favourite masechta (this will be the 5th time I’ll go through it b’ezras H’).
I count about 7 there…
Wish me mazal tov tomorrow when I finally finish (I fell a little bit behind)…
Back in the hotel lobby, Yossi was taking his first, second, third and fourth look at Shoshana Beis. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what he found interesting about her – her round wire glasses, the old-fashioned Nikon she wore round her neck or that massive trunk on legs that sat by her side with a look of menace in what he presumed would be its eyes had it had any. She looked back up at him.
“So, your surname, Rachatzruach is it? Interesting, never really heard of it before. Where does it come from?”
Yossi breathed a sigh of relief. He’d been down this route many times before. It was time for “the shpiel”; he gave it to every girl and it was true. Most of it anyway. Or some of it. Well, bits of it had seen the truth from a distance at some point and that’s all that really counted.
“My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was a ger, you see. Greek. Ancient Greek actually, you know toga, sandals, Zeus-fan – that kind of thing. Name was Lavaeolus or some such and there aren’t many of his descendants left anymore. My family are basically the last ones left. I’ve got a cousin of some variety who’s a Rosh Yeshiva in some place down in Australia, and I think my dad has a cousin somewhere who’s an accountant but we don’t talk about him. Apart from them, it’s just us.”
Shoshana appeared to be interested, but that didn’t really mean a thing. His last 49 dates had also appeared interested but they all said “no” to a second date, so hey. He decided to try a different track.
“You read the newspapers?” He asked.
Shoshana nodded, reached into the psychotic truck and pulled out a copy of what looked like The Times.
“Mostly for the typos,” she said sheepishly, passing it across to him and pointing to the banner at the top of the front page. He read it.
“The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret”.
He looked back up and saw her staring over his shoulder. Turning, he saw a middle-aged man in full Catholic clerical garb standing by the door.
“Don’t worry about him,” he told Shoshana, “that’s just Father O’Flagherty. He’s the priest who’ll discover that’s he’s Jewish shortly before the end of the story. We still have to get past the Baal Teshuva who has a deep, spiritual experience in Tzfas, the one who has a deep, spiritual experience going to mikva, the one who sees the simcha in the deep, spiritual experience of a frum wedding and the secular American, probably a very succesful one, with a generic name who suddenly realises that he’s missing something in his life and then sees a picture of a made-up Chassidishe Rebbe and has a deep, spiritual experience before we get to the priest.”
Shoshana groaned. “One of those stories is it?”
“‘Fraid so.”
“And so you’re probably going to go to kollel and then somehow get caught up in a web of intrigue involving the CIA, possibly the now-defunct KGB, MI5, Mossad, some Arab terrorists and one or two Neo-Nazis, and yet somehow, without any training or experience outwit all the highly trained operatives from all these various organisations, save the day and when offered a huge reward you’ll turn it down saying that all that matters to you is your Torah.”
“Yup. Looks like it…” said Yossi.
“Bother,” said Shoshana.
“And the author will probably use long words that they don’t really know the meaning of, and those that they kind of know the mean of they’ll use out of context. I expect we’ll end up getting married in a ‘sumptuously decorated’ hall and I can’t imagine we’ll be able to just say anything anymore, we’ll have to state it,” stated Yossi.
“Look, a statement is declarative expression that is either true or false. It is one sided and does not usually come about during two-way conversation,” declared Yossi.
“And a declaration is pretty much the same thing,” he pontificated.
“Well, a pontification is an expression of personal opinion or a declaration from the Pope. I was giving definitions,” he genuflected.
Yossi jumped out of his seat waving his fist in the air,
“Genuflection isn’t a type of speech at all you stupid author! It’s a way of showing respect by bowing on one knee!” he ranted.
Shoshana looked him up and down. And down and up. Slowly, he sat back down in his seat, breathing heavily. Shoshana looked him in the eye and, with great solemnity, exclaimed “Baruch Hashem!”
He boggled a bit.
“Y’what?!”
“Well,” dictated Shoshana, (“dictation is the laying down of authority, pinhead!”)”If it’s going to be one of those stories then I have to randomly say ‘Baruch Hashem’ every now and then. It’s the law, I think.”
There was a small cough from next to them. It came from a small man. He was a rather grubby looking small man in an over-sized trench-coat who held a tray of goods, or more accurately – possibly adequates, in front of him.
“Latke in a bun?” he asked, proffering a small, greasy item in a small, greasy bun in his small, greasy hand. “Only $1, and that’s payin’-me-own-taxes…”
No I don’t, though Granny Weatherwax Borrows it sometimes…
Sorry, mix-up with Arthurian legend going on…
I have a pet yennork too (canine, obviously)…
GAW – That was different. A) It wasn’t because of the magical field but because she was mistakenly identified as the 7th son of a 7th son and the handing over of the staff is irreversible. B) It was a quasi-sociological issue, not an anatomical or biological one. Same reason there is the occasional male witch…
tzaddiq – Yes they can, and have, seriously answered, responded to and refuted all these points and more. chance simply does not want to listen to reason and has been posting wilder and wilder claims about the medical industry in general and some weird conspiracy stuff and then wonders why we think she(?) is being ridiculous.
GAW – No need for a space-ship (although Da Quirm made a very handy one), Great A’Tuin is clearly female. Unless it is the male of Chelys galactica that gives birth – she/he/it had 8 baby Great Star Turtles at one point.
chance – Wait, so you believe the doctors who tell you that formaldehyde causes cancer but these same doctors tell you that vaccination works and is necessary and suddenly these doctors know nothing?!
Furthermore, people get exposed to formaldehyde from all kinds of sources (“Formaldehyde sources in the home include pressed-wood products, cigarette smoke, and fuel-burning appliances.” from your very own NCI paper that you obviously hadn’t read properly) but you simply pick a thing which has it in and say “this is it, this is what’s causing cancer”. The study you quote simply says that continued high levels of exposure to formaldehyde, such as those experienced by funeral workers, increases the risk (note: not causes) of developing cancer later in life. The one-off, minute amount of formaldehyde in one or two vaccines (by no means even the majority) will in no way do the same. Please, if you want us to take your claims even semi-seriously, learn how to read a scientific paper.
gefen – In a similar vein, and I know this isn’t Yeshivish but an American colloquialism, we have “off of” as in “I just got off of the bus”. Americans are entitled to it but those of us who speak real English will carry on saying simply “I just got off the bus”, thanks…
I have a Gonne… Does that count?
Well, as we all know, if you carry some iron on you then the Elves (who basically cause all disease, or at least make you think you’re ill…) can’t get you. So why vaccinate?
Not yet, unfortunately. I don’t have much reading time at the moment. Maybe in the summer….
GAW – Archdeacon Vorbis reliably informs me that the world is a sphere, and, after much persuasion, I have admitted to this. The truth in this case really did hurt…
P.S. The Turtle Moves!
How about the 8th Day lyric “don’t forget from where you’re from”….