On 27 Oct 2004, at 20:26, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jens Ropers wrote:
- You suspect that people dislike you and that they do so because
they somehow don't want you to have your own wikis. Lemme put it like this: Imagine some person travelled to the U.S. Now imagine that it turns out that that person didn't actually come as an immigrant, and didn't come to settle in and become a citizen of the country but rather proceeded to lecture the citizens of the U.S. that the Declaration of Independence and all these old handwritten papers were fundamentally unimportant because all men are not created equal and actually, certain people are per se inferior and not to be trusted and it is ok to rape and murder them and plunder their houses, whereas others are really not to be blamed of anything of any consequence, whatever happens and, err... actually...
To put this more starkly: Imagine visiting a country that has a known reputation for human rights violation. You meet with a small group of people and the conversation turns to the human rights situation where you have tremendous ideas about what THEY can do to improve things. Some of the group show a great deal of enthusiasm about your proposals. After the conversation ends you go to the airport and home. You later receive a message that one of the people in the group was an incognito agent for the government who subsequently arranged for the arrest and re-education of some of the group. What responsibility would you accept for that situation?
Ec
I guess I see what you're saying there "having a stake in the outcome". And morally, yea, I maybe should accept some responsibility then but the stark reality there is that it really wouldn't matter whether or not I felt bad in the said scenario, because my attitude would pretty much have zilch impact on the other's predicament. Again, the question of having or not having a stake in the outcome is what it runs down to. Anyway, I don't really want to pursue this particular thread further, because it concerns point (3) of this email: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-October/ 001375.html -- which was really just something that veered off into an ironic aside.
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com