protectionist
Diamond Member
- Oct 20, 2013
- 57,937
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- #21
FALSE! I'm NOT a stranger here. I've been posting for 5 years. Have authored hundreds of OPs & posted tens of thousands of posts. My thoughts are public information, and very well-known.That you don't is intrinsically problematic.
And, not, it's not about you or me. It's merely that we are strangers who happen to find ourselves exchanging words via the Internet.
- I don't know you at all. Like everyone else here, you are a complete stranger to me, and I to you. Consequently, neither of our "real world" reputations carries any weight here.
- People are given to all sorts of misrepresentations of fact, context, nuance, etc. Some people do it deliberately, some are so f*cking clueless they don't know they're doing so, and others do it as a result of carelessness. Until one knows a person well, one cannot suss what motivation another may have. Were I to recognize your ID or avatar -- I recognize neither -- I might have some idea of whether you've misrepresented my remarks or others' that you and I both heard/read. Thus your word, to me, is no different than that of another complete stranger; I would expect you are equally unfamiliar my ID and avatar.
- Of all the places where one must practice "trust, but verify," the Internet surely is foremost among them.
It's also not a matter of my expressly questioning your word; I neither blindly question it nor blindly accept it. It's a matter of my wanting to know, before I start discussing a matter, that the representations of it that one's presented are completely accurate and representationally faithful. If I'm not confident of that, I'm at risk of looking ridiculous when, having relied upon someone else's representation and remarking on the matter based on their say-so, it turns out they misrepresented a material aspect of the matter. That's just a discursive risk I don't have to take and won't. It's also a risk I don't impose upon my readers.
Here's an example of exactly the scenario I just described playing out to quite a few folks' reputations' detriment.
How hard would it have been for Fox to verify that man's claim? Not hard at all; it'd be literally child's play to do so. All a Fox staffer had to do was forward the email to CNN, asking, "Is this email authentic?" CNN, of course, would have said, "no," and simply forwarded the original unedited email to the Fox staffer. A quick check of the email header info would have confirmed that CNN was telling the truth and that Haab SOB wasn't and that'd have been that. No story, but no embarrassment for not upholding the most basic of journalistic standards later either.