You can find my email address on my blog (which unfortunately doesn’t have any posts about our primary topic here).

I mean what I have said in the past, that disagreement is welcomed, that agitation can be healthy. This did not seem healthy criticism to me.

I write personal essays, a form and style that is centered upon my beliefs. I do not write that Obama is honestly using the term “empathy” for any reason other than I believe that to be the case. There are no facts to prove my belief one way or the other. And that is often the case in human relations, and since most of my writing falls into the personal essay category, nearly everything I say is bound up in my beliefs.

I would ask you to please consider the force of allegations of dishonesty and manipulation. I have worked all my life against dishonesty and manipulation. I can’t prove that either. But I believe if you asked the hundreds or thousands of people I have worked with or written about all these many years, the evidence would support my assertion.

not that you are intentionally being dishonest, but the result is the same

i’m sorry that was not clear. i have no reason to doubt your good intentions. which is why i tried to describe my reaction to your statements (and more bluntly than i would in the middle of an active thread) – i thought you would want to know. perhaps i was wrong in that also.

You are wrong, and your words are slander. I do not know your motivations, and I will not speculate.

Read someone else and refrain from commenting on my posts if you wish. Should you wish to continue reading and commenting on my posts, I’ll do my best to reply honestly to your comments — which I have encouraged in the past. But I won’t be silent in the face your slander.

I was actually thinking of a tweet novel made up just like an epistolary novel — though of course each depends on the author’s (and to an extent the reader’s) experience of the real thing.

But amazingly enough there is a real emergent IRC “short story” that has just come to my attention (regarding a pretty nerdy topic, the wonderfulness of Perl 6). Of course it was edited, but I think not falsified. It has a narrative arc, a little character development and even a surprise ending. It is actually surprisingly close to twitter, since most of the “utterances” are actually under 140 characters. The conventions are different, and it is closer to a real conversation, but still…

Reflecting a bit it seems like we can do the same thing for lots of topic areas: military spending (cold war vs. multi-lateral world); education (don’t know the issues well enough, but one is educating for factory / corporation vs. life long learning and creating one’s own narrative); energy and environmental policy; etc.

In each case the two characters would need to be specific to that domain: enlisted people for military vignettes, I guess; teachers for education; engineers or construction people for energy and environment; etc. I’d love to see some vignettes between an “old way” energy worker (oil drilling guy) and a “new way” guy (solar or wind builder, but obviously a blue collar construction guy).

This character building is harder than the Apple case where they have the same two guys in each vignette. But I think it can work fine. There will need to be some common themes in all of the “old way” characters and in all of the “new way” characters to help tie them together for people.

“I believe Obama means it.”

i have no problem with that statement. bs meter is silent.

but when you try to sell me your beliefs as fact? yeah, i’ve got a problem with that. a serious problem. even if i agreed with you – because i think selling your beliefs as thought they were facts is dishonest. not that you are intentionally being dishonest, but the result is the same. and you do it a lot.

as a kid i was indoctrinated with some very right wing beliefs in the church i belonged to. the process of breaking with that indoctrination taught me to be very wary of people who try to manipulate my beliefs.

i invite you to try to persuade – not manipulate – me. but please make a distinction between what you can justify as fact and what is your personal belief.

p.s. i didn’t ask for proof, i only asked for evidence.

When Obama talks about empathy, however, he means it.

what’s your evidence? how long have you know him intimately enough to make that kind of judgement accurately?

it’s when you make claims like this that my bs meter is pegged.