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Two options for interpretation of this are presented by way of terrible writing -- you omitted all the justification for the bolded segment and the result is this.
I can read this as "because of the way things work in PMMM, it is good for meguca to only care about themselves."
I can read this as "it is good for people to only care about themselves."
Now let's dig into the subtext. With the words "but she", you contrast Sakura's mindset against Sabrina's. This would make sense if we were in PMMM and not in PMAS -- it would read a lot like a contrast between Homura and Sayaka. However that is not the case. We are in PMAS, where the rules are slightly different, and when I can already read the bolded section in either of the ways I have cited, contrasting it against Sabrina's views -- that everyone should care about others; that the meguca who don't are in understandable positions because of how things were before we turned up with clear seeds, but that they should probably change now -- pushes it towards the latter of the two cases, making that the much more likely interpretation...
As this post shows.
Makes sense with the first interpretation, makes you sound like a comic book villain trying to justify themselves under the second and much more easily adopted interpretation.
Another poster reads the second interpretation and perceives your second post as the words of a troll, madman, or douchebag.
Let's break this down. Are you around the sort of people (that make caring (about yourself) not extend to caring about others) because they are good for you? -- that is the reading of this sentence.
Not quite a rule 3 violation solely because you're arguing on a track you've failed to express to anyone else in a manner that would cause them to understand what you're saying. If you intended interpretation 2 earlier, then this would be a site ban, I expect. This should be grounds for a warning for bordering rule 3 anyway: there was no cause for you to directly talk about Onmur in this situation, you could and should have used hypotheticals and scenarios -- tools for actual productive arguments -- instead of questioning the personal state of other participants.
Sure, makes sense under interpretation 2, which you still failed to convey btw.
Given interpretation 1, at this point other posters are struggling for words.
Dear madokami.
No, he isn't saying that. He never said anything like that. He has been citing your argument this entire time and you're accusing him of saying the things he interpreted you to be saying, but he has never actually said them. So, this is unacceptable and flat-out wrong.
You should receive points for this. The appropriate response to someone asking you not to make negative comments about their life is never to say that you don't care. This is rule 3.
The last line of this post is more of interpretation 2, so again, nobody understands it.
I'm going to ignore the second half of this post because it's not doing anything more than starting a separate argument entirely. I understand what it's saying, but claiming that evolution = rightness is a moral/philosophical issue.
In the first half you write some stuff that is pretty reasonable and then give a non-apology. Breaking it down, "I do apologise (sic) that the way (that i attempted to convey my beliefe (sic)) had the side effect (of implying that your life situation was otherwise detrimental to your, well, to your life)." Now, the issue here is that you're apologizing not for implying that he's an abuse victim (and by extension that some of his friends/family IRL are terrible people) but instead that what you said implied that. This is "I'm sorry the bullet I fired killed him" versus "I'm sorry I killed him," and it is again skirting rule 3. All you had to do was write "I'm sorry," but instead you went out of the way to take a minute to draw up a round-about way of not actually apologizing.
Then you kind of "pithily" dismiss his arguments with a mild personal attack.
Well, no, he's actually believing what it is rational to consider the most likely meaning to be if you don't assume foreknowledge of Marcus.D.Basterd's thought processes, because as we described at the top of this whole thing, the most likely interpretation of what you wrote is not what you wanted it to be. And then you write this...
you kind of go on to make another mild personal attack, saying that surely his failure to interpret your poor writing the way you wanted it to be interpreted means he is a troll who is writing what he is writing for kicks. Weren't you supposed to be trying to apologize to him a moment earlier? Why did you write this? Why didn't you just not write this? What did this add to your argument?
There is something that is called a "pattern of behavior" on this site. Now, I've seen a fair amount of you on this site, and what I've seen is that your pattern of behavior is to enter threads, write a bunch of stuff that makes perfect sense from your perspective, but which nobody else interprets the way you want them to -- due to your poor writing, in which you routinely mess up critical subtextual elements and don't make any attempt to compensate by adding relevant detail -- and then you make snippy remarks and mild personal attacks and write things that aren't mean but just aren't nice, that come off as annoyed and high-handed, because you refuse to consider that what other people are saying is the result of you conveying meanings that you don't intend to in your posts. You fly under mod attention by being mild about it but constantly come off as an undesirable element because in order to read your stuff as anything other than a wagonload of nonsense, people have to physically mine out your intended meaning with a pickaxe. And people don't want to spend time on mining out your intended meaning with a pickaxe, because you're not their friend, you're just some dude on the internet -- why should they owe it to you to put in the effort to mine out your intended meaning with a pickaxe? So instead they just find the easiest meaning in your posts that they can, and time and time again the easy meaning to take from your posts is something insane and/or evil, as it was in this case -- again, see interpretation 2, and in fact, let me put it here again:
And let me point out that as much as you subsequently made the (reasonable!) point that it can be and almost always is in a person's self interest to care about others, in this post, when it is considered under interpretation 2, you have the additional subtext of placing the words "but she" right after "for the same reason that we care about them we also care about others,". In other words, you wrote this:
we (also) care about others, but she (only cares about herself).
You know what the subtext of that is? It's that she only cares about herself, and by using the words "only", "we care about others, but she", you have thoroughly and utterly characterized this as the type of self-interest which excludes others.
Let me make this completely, totally clear. Your writing is telling people things you don't mean for it to say. Given that, it shouldn't be a surprise that everyone else thinks you're saying things that you didn't mean to say.
Now, the problem is that this basically results in your writing acting as a troll. I want to immediately separate this from you being a troll, because you don't intend to be a troll, it's just that the things your writing is saying that you don't mean for it to be saying are the words of a troll. Got that? Good. Now we can conclude this.
Nobody wants to ban you, and that's because you don't mean to be a troll.
Everybody is incredibly annoyed by you, because your posts act like the posts of a troll.
Some people outright hate you, because you're not nice about the ways in which you consistently make these mistakes. You don't recognize that you're capable of conveying a different meaning than you intended in your writing, and you don't consider it, and you interpret people taking a different meaning from it than you intended to be an intentional action against you. You don't ever have a conversation that goes anything like this:
Marcus.D.Basterd: "Oh, I never said that, what made you think that?"
Poster: "This made me think that!"
Marcus.D.Basterd: "It did? I don't see it?"
Poster: "How can you not see it!"
Marcus.D.Basterd: "wtf do you mean?"
Poster: "This, this, the other thing, you're implying this by doing this, etcetera! This is obvious!"
Marcus.D.Basterd: "It... it is?"
If you had conversations like that, people would be more tolerant and you'd learn to move away from this situation you're in. But you don't, because your conversations go like this:
Marcus.D.Basterd: "Stuff that doesn't convey the meaning I think it does."
Poster: "WTF!?"
Marcus.D.Basterd: "What do you mean wtf?"
Poster 2: "This is what we mean wtf."
And then this happens:
Again, let me reiterate, this is what your conversations look like:
Marcus.D.Basterd: "Stuff that doesn't convey the meaning I think it does."
Poster: "WTF!?"
Marcus.D.Basterd: "What do you mean wtf?"
Poster 2: "This is what we mean wtf."
Marcus.D.Basterd: "Are you around the sort of people that make caring about yourself not extend to caring about others because they are good for you? Because if you think that that is normal then you are in a horrible horrible situation."
The problem, of course, is that instead of going back and recognizing that the problem was the first line, where you said stuff that didn't convey the meaning you thought it did, you started questioning a poster's personal situation.
This can't continue, okay? Your first post in this thread was Oct 10, 2016. The pattern of this behavior dates back to that time, and it hasn't changed at all. It's hard to see it from just this thread, even, but everywhere I go I meet QMs, posters, and they say the exact same things about you. "I can't tell if he is a troll or if he is just bad at writing." I cannot count, on both hands and both feet, the number of times I have heard that line.
You need to start recognizing that this is a problem you have and acting rationally about it. You call yourself a journeyman rationalist on your profile. One thing that rational people do is they consider whether they might be oblivious to their own flaws. It is high time you developed that habit. It was high time a year ago. I am not an English PHD, but you need to learn to be a more skillful user of the language, and you need to accept that you have that need.
Now if you will excuse me, I need to report myself, because I am skirting the hell out of a whole laundry list of staff policies with this post, however much what it says needed to be said. Have a nice night everyone, and please remain civil, wonderful people, because the best way to get me fifty points would be to turn this post into a derail.
