Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6701509" data-attributes="member: 4937">Certainly it is.  I can judge for myself whether he is successful according to my own standards.  I'm not obligated to use his standards.  I am interested in hearing exactly what he wants to provoke in people, and I hope it isn't something as stupid as "thought", and I'm interested in whether he feels he is successful.  But none of that prevents me from judging whether the post is a success.No it doesn't.  While I don't go as far as the essay does, I think there is merit in believing that a person is not always conscious of their own intent.  I'm not required to believe that other people are always rational, deliberative, and know their own mind.But more to the point, I never have argued that his purpose was to be offensive.  The quote you've latched onto out of context was largely rhetorical in scope, in that I was saying that though I did not believe it was his intention to be offensive, if it had have been his intention he would have missed his mark.  Likewise, I went on to say that though I did not believe it was his intention to be offensive, had it in fact been his intention to be offensive or even if indeed I had been offended, I would have not regarded the speech as inappropriate.Oh for crying out loud.  Do you even know what a rhetorical is? When something begins with, "But were it intended to be...", it doesn't concede that it is factual.  It is a rhetorical device.  It is a statement clearly labeled as a hypothetical.  In this case I'm not conceding the claim that the aside about the non-existence of God was primarily or even at all intended to be provocative.  I am only saying that if the statement about the non-existence of God were intended to be provocative, it is pretty easy to infer which audience it would have been intended to be provocative to.  Are you actually quibbling with that point?  That question is not rhetorical.I think it is reasonable to assume that for the entire post the intended audience is what he declared it to be explicitly: "I am writing new episodes for my video-podcast series on RPG reviews and issues".  And I think it's reasonable to assume from the content that the overall audience of the essay is, "People who play RPGs".  And in any event, it hardly matters since whom the audience of the whole essay is doesn't complicate the matter of whom the comment about the non-existence of God would be directed to if in fact it was the case that it was either intended to be provocative or give offense - which again I don't actually concede.  And my assumption that he wasn't intending the comment to be provocative or offensive is backed up with the additional evidence that the OP writes: "But for the moment let me simply say I did not write the column to piss off Celebrim."Yay!  Agreement.</blockquote>

Verification