Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I think this non-big-five book, which I recommend, is relevant:
http://www.thebigsort.com/home.php
As explained in the book, once you get even 60 percent of the people in a neighborhood agreeing on something -- anything -- opinions tend to ramp up in intensity until you start seeing righteous certainty. This kind of thread is such a neighborhood.
Perhaps there are listservs, restricted to major-published authors, where they similarly ramp up until there are comparable statements of certainty, albeit with opposite content. Good thing, for those authors' sake, that, AFAIK, any such forums are non-public. Neighborhoods of certainty do not look so attractive from the outside.
Personally, I don't like this kind of rah-rah our side is right. Maybe it's for the same unknown reason that the sports fan gene seems to have mostly skipped my family. |
I am unsure how
anyone can fail to agree that this letter was full of basic grammar problems on the first line, general misunderstandings of "consumer products" to the point where I would like to mail them a dictionary, and baseless accusation of any non-book products as being Chinese garbage.
I would happily consider anything any Hachette supporter says to be utterly wrong, but to go the next step and accuse it of being a pile of steaming garbage requires that it remind me of a one-time headline "Literarcy Week Observed".
When I said "This objection is a steaming pile of garbage . . ." it was just my way of
at someone who seems to feel that any accusation of "steaming pile of garbage" is automatically "[I] disagree with the authors, then it's a steaming pile of garbage" and in doing so, has committed the same fallacy of automatically dismissing the opponent's arguments because he disagrees.
Naturally, I and others went on to provide reasoning behind what we say, which helps to justify our certainty. It helps when the other side obliges by not offering
any reasoning going the other way.