Nobody's fault but mine

originally posted by Lee Short:
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
One of the aspects that I have seen over and over again here on this particular place within the internet system is that if someone [Person A, let's say] is dismissive of a particular wine, a wine that is the result of (at least) a year's labor, that speaker is somehow seen as speaking the true word and the more courageous for it. But if somebody else [let's call him or her Person B] takes issue with how quickly the wine in question was batted away like a mosquito from the face, it is Person B, not A, who is called out as the asshole.

Which is bullshit.
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No, it's not.

One is dismissing a wine, one is dismissing a person. That's not the same thing at all.

No one that I am aware of has been called out as an asshole without actually being an asshole. You know, like calling someone "a smug wine scum" rather than saying "this is why your writing sucks." See, one's attacking a person and one is attacking a product (their output). Not the same thing at all.

And sure, you can attack a person by writing an attack on a product and throwing in a little innuendo. But that doesn't really fool much of anybody who doesn't want to be fooled.
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Do wines have people behind them who produce them or not?
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
No, it's not.

One is dismissing a wine, one is dismissing a person. That's not the same thing at all.
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Do wines have people behind them who produce them or not?
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So saying "I don't like your wine" is equivalent to saying "you suck?"

Logic like that, I really have no way of engaging with.
 
originally posted by Lee Short:
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
No, it's not.

One is dismissing a wine, one is dismissing a person. That's not the same thing at all.
Click to expand...

Do wines have people behind them who produce them or not?
Click to expand...

So saying "I don't like your wine" is equivalent to saying "you suck?"

Logic like that, I really have no way of engaging with.
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what a fucking stupid thing to say.

fb.
 
originally posted by fatboy:
originally posted by Lee Short:
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
No, it's not.

One is dismissing a wine, one is dismissing a person. That's not the same thing at all.
Click to expand...

Do wines have people behind them who produce them or not?
Click to expand...

So saying "I don't like your wine" is equivalent to saying "you suck?"

Logic like that, I really have no way of engaging with.
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what a fucking stupid thing to say.

fb.
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So this is the Verbal Abuse room after all.

Rightie-o, then, let's get on with it!
 
I think y'all need to read (and re-read) Otto's explosive tasting note and think about the implications to the importer/blogger/wine enjoyer. Liquid Viagara indeed!
 
originally posted by Lee Short:


So this is the Verbal Abuse room after all.

Rightie-o, then, let's get on with it!
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oh. i'm sorry.

i didn't mean, "you suck."

i meant of course, "i'm not sure about the relevance or veracity of your comment." but i can see why you might be confused, or why you might take offense at the way i put it.

mean culpa -- it's just that your comment was such utterly pointless, sanctimonious tosh that i got carried away in the verbals.

fb.
 
originally posted by fatboy:
originally posted by Lee Short:


So this is the Verbal Abuse room after all.

Rightie-o, then, let's get on with it!
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oh. i'm sorry.

i didn't mean, "you suck."

i meant of course, "i'm not sure about the relevance or veracity of your comment." but i can see why you might be confused, or why you might take offense at the way i put it.

mean culpa -- it's just that your comment was such utterly pointless, sanctimonious tosh that i got carried away in the verbals.

fb.
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Try learning about denotation, connotation, and category error.

Then get back to me.
 
originally posted by Lee Short:

Try learning about denotation, connotation, and category error.

Then get back to me.
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the first two are made up words for people who haven't got the brains to take the logic of their analysis to its own conclusion. however you choose to "explain" the mental representations that are supposed to cash out denotation and connotation -- whether it's vague appeals to innateness, the baby jesus or l ron hubbard is up to you -- there are some very simple principles of computation that guarantee that, in terms of explaining how language works, neither word says much beyond, "lee is out of his depth on this shit."

the latter is in how you slice your bread.

taken together they add up to, "lee is way out of his depth on this shit, but who cares?"

because the good thing for you, of course, is that we're drifting off into esoterica. most people won't fucking know. which means that if you are lucky, some people won't notice that you are running for the usual cover of fatuous interweb bullshit rather than ponying up and admitting that people don't say, as you blithely suggested "i don't like your wine" -- they say, "your wine is shit," or "your wine is no better than drano because you are incompetent."

so let's make this clear: you are running for the usual cover of fatuous interweb bullshit. because you know damn well people don't say, "i don't like your wine" -- you know damn well that what they say is, "your wine is flawed," and "your wine is badly made," and you know damn well they say it even though what they mean is "i don't like your wine."

and, as you also damn well know, usually, people go further: some people get a boner out of coming up with nasty shit; and everyone wants the kids on kane's secret wine bored to think, "you are the man!"

what's more, people tend to peddle this self-regarding bullshit after tasting wine in situations where the basic biology of taste perception can easily tell them that they haven't got a clue.

do i want to know what someone thinks about the 42nd vin jaune they tasted in a flight, when every perceptual receptor in their fucking brain is so adapted that they've essentially been conditioned to ignore whatever the wine maker was trying to do?

actually, no i don't.

do i want to hear them tell me that the wine is shitty, when their brain was doing well to notice it was liquid?

nope again.

do i think this kind of self-regarding blowhard bullshit is fucking disrespectful to the people who made the wine.

well, yes actually, i do.

so, even though i haven't ordinarily thought of you as someone who sucks, i thought your response to levi was lame. and you know what i think of your response to me, because i've explained it.

why not think on that a while.

fb.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
For those who are too bored to follow, Lee is right, fatboy is wrong almost on all counts.
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Thanks, Professor.

Larry (who dropped out of Philosophy 1A class as a Freshman at UCSB because he couldn't figure out how any 18 year old could have a defined personal philosophy at that hormone-addled age...)
 
Let me get this straight. It would have been OK to trash Bernstein's recordings, but Harold Schoenberg's write-up of the same was off limits?

Think again.
 
originally posted by .sasha:
Let me get this straight. It would have been OK to trash Bernstein's recordings, but Harold Schoenberg's write-up of the same was off limits?

Think again.
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That depends on whether Schoenberg criticized Bernstein's recordings and/or compositions or criticized Bernstein. The distinction isn't between criticism and meta-criticism. It's the ancient one between argument and ad hominem attack. It's really not that difficult a distinction.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
For those who are too bored to follow, Lee is right, fatboy is wrong almost on all counts.
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masterfully argued professor. and contentful as always.

i'm told that kane's secret winebored went into a masturbatory frenzy after this one.

fb.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by .sasha:
Let me get this straight. It would have been OK to trash Bernstein's recordings, but Harold Schoenberg's write-up of the same was off limits?

Think again.
Click to expand...

That depends on whether Schoenberg criticized Bernstein's recordings and/or compositions or criticized Bernstein. The distinction isn't between criticism and meta-criticism. It's the ancient one between argument and ad hominem attack. It's really not that difficult a distinction.
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That's much clearer and, if I am absorbing the pith of this disorderly dust-up, gets at fb's main point with admirable economy of words. I believe him to be saying, in his colorful idiom, that the formulation of a product criticism may be tantamount to an ad hominem; further, that the criticizer, when not sensitive to this distinction, may reasonably be held accountable for overlooking it.

Thank you, prof.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:


That depends on whether Schoenberg criticized Bernstein's recordings and/or compositions or criticized Bernstein. The distinction isn't between criticism and meta-criticism. It's the ancient one between argument and ad hominem attack. It's really not that difficult a distinction.
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like most such distinctions, it works fine in abstract, and it might just fool the philosophy 1a dropouts, but it becomes a question of "he says, she says" in practice.

because while it might be easy to see the ad hominem in, "as usual, schoenberg, what i see here is the kind of vacuous twaddle that i have learned to expect from someone who peddles a second-rate nonsense at a third-tier newspaper," things are rarely so clear.

what about when someone says, "schoenberg's arguments are flawed," but adds nothing more? (you may recognize this lame-assed trick, btw.)

in the latter case, schoenberg gets called a peddler of flawed arguments, which is ad hominem, even though the criticism appears to be related to his arguments.

and these are the easy cases.

fb.
 
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