The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #126102   Message #2811066
Posted By: MGM·Lion
13-Jan-10 - 01:16 PM
Thread Name: BS: attempt mass murder Christmas
Subject: RE: BS: attempt mass murder Christmas
===I think constantly mischaracterizing what I've said, and then calling it naive (among other things) is making it personal, MtheGM, and that's precisely what you have persisted in doing.
If you want to have a discussion with me on the issues, please at least have the courtesy to read what I have said and stop trying to get me to defend arguments that I have not made.
====

I read what is before me, Carol, and I evaluate it. It is a job in which I am trained and experienced. I am a graduate in English of the University of Cambridge, whose English faculty is universally considered among the leading ones of the world. I have for many years been a professional theatre critic for The Guardian, one of our leading newpapers; Plays & Players, a leading theatrical journal; Early Modern Literary Studies, the distinguished online journal of Shakespeare studies [which can be googled free online]: and a book critic also for The Times, The Educational Supplement, The Teacher, The Bookseller, Literary Review - to name just a few...

I am an experienced reader in other words, Carol. I know how to read what is before me and analyse it. It's my profession. It's my job. It's what they pay me for. Do you think these journals and organisations would have been employing me to do it all these years if I couldn't do it efficiently. It is an offensive personal attack [to adopt for a moment some of your modes of thought] to suggest as you are doing that I don't know my job.

So if someone writes something, and I carry from it, not once but repeatedly, impressions of their meanings which they say are not the ones they intended, I suspect the fault might just be in their expression of their content, not in my reading of it.

It is not, in other words, Carol, that I have failed to comprehend your arguments — it is that you have not made them efficiently and coherently. So it's no use, your constant bleating that I am making personal attacks, or denouncing you for saying things you haven't said. No I haven't. And yes you have. You might think you haven't — but you have.

I leave it to others to go back over the threads and the posts if they have a mind, to find where you have said all those things which you now say you haven't.

I now say that you are a vain, confused, opinionated person, of limited ability in self-expression, who resorts to abuse (accusations of personal attacks when none have been made — until, perhaps, this one!) when her arguments are comprehensively refuted by those who understand what they say — which, I reiterate, is not necessarily the same as what you meant them to say.

Do not rejoin in the hopes that I shall read your rejoinder. I really have done. I shall not even open this thread again to see what you might have to respond, because I don't even care. If anyone else is interested, which I doubt, then they can adjudicate between us if they have a mind.

Adieu.