re: #68 Killgore Trout

By the way, since you’re here I wanted to point something else out to you. Remember yesterday when I quoted a portion of Amos Oz’s article on fanaticism and you followed up by saying this?

Your response made me twitch and therefore choose to ignore you because it made it clear that you were only trying to (as gdf said) shoehorn in your POV.

The portion I posted was from the last two paragraphs of page 2, and the first paragraph of page 3—if you’d bothered to click the link I provided and continue reading (or better yet read it from the beginning), halfway through page 4 you would’ve encountered this (emphasis mine):

If I could only compress a sense of humor into capsules and persuade entire populations to swallow my humor pills, thus immunizing everybody against fanatics, I might qualify one day for the Nobel Prize in medicine, not in literature. But just listen to me! The idea of compressing a sense of humor into capsules, the very idea of making other people swallow my humor pills for their own good, thus curing them of their trouble, is already slightly contaminated with fanaticism. Be careful: Fanaticism is extremely catching, more contagious than any virus. You might easily contract fanaticism even as you are trying to defeat or combat it.

You have only to read a newspaper or watch the television news to see how easily people may become anti-fanatic fanatics, anti-fundamentalist zealots, anti-jihad crusaders. Eventually, if we cannot defeat fanaticism, perhaps we can at least contain it a little bit. As I have said, the ability to laugh at ourselves is a partial cure; the ability to see ourselves as others see us is another medicine. […]

utne.com

So you see, KT, when I read your comment I knew full well that you hadn’t so much as bothered to lift your finger and click on what I’d provided, which told me that you weren’t trying to have any sort of conversation, you just saw an opportunity to once again shove your POV in our faces and jumped on it.