dha is the catalog!

John Haugeland john at crowdtilt.com
Wed May 29 14:52:26 PDT 2013


Well, then an explanation is in order.

Loon is a significantly derogatory term.  There are ways to discuss people
with mental illness which do not carry that level of stigma.

Similarly, someone's gender orientation probably isn't meaningful for
discussion, especially not when rolled together with madness and other
critically toned comments.  There's nothing particularly wrong with cross
dressing; that's a lifestyle, not a problem.  This is particularly of
interest because Ed was placed into that lifestyle by his mother, rather
than through personal orientation.

Also of note is that I think the accusation of mental illness is probably
over-stated.  He was in the 1950s, when adult fetishes were considered a
sign of mental illness (simple things like one now takes for granted.)  By
modern standards, he wouldn't even be considered particularly kinky.
Remember, this was a time when the head of the FBI was terrified that
people would discover he wore dresses in private, and would as a result be
institutionalized or lobotomized.  Things are different today.

I don't know that uri particularly made me angry, but it was fairly easy to
understand as a comment that could trouble people who themselves were or
had friends or family who were in these groups.  We're all sort of riding
out a wave of massive over-sensitivity in software engineering, to the
point that an outsider can over-hear and misunderstand a joke about forking
a codebase, and end up getting three people fired.

So let's err on the side of being considerate, until we can go back to
being a community of plain spoken people?

Anyway, that's how I see it.  Thanks for hearing me out, and I won't speak
to the matter again.

Also, his bad movies are actually really good.  They're like movies that
someone was dared to make.  Give them a chance.  It's not like we're
talking about Hammer Films here.  :)  If you think Plan 9 from Outer Space
is the worst movie of all time, I recommend a good solid showing of Legend
of the Seven Golden Vampires, or other unrelated classics like Attack of
the Killer Tomatoes Part 3 and Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD.




On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Reini Urban <rurban at x-ray.at> wrote:

> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 3:04 AM, Brian Fraser <fraserbn at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Uri Guttman <uri at stemsystems.com>
> wrote:
> >> plan 9 is just the most famous worst film ever. it was voted that some
> >> years ago so it clings to that title. the director (ed wood) was a loon
> and
> >> transvestite among other things (like a bad director).
> >
> > So.. apparently being a transvestite is not only a bad thing, but just as
> > bad as being a loon. What do you know. uri--, this is not acceptable
> > behavior.
>
> I have no idea what you inferring here, and why you are doing it.
> Ed Wood was pretty well-known to be a loon (a crazy lunatic),
> a cross dresser (some outsiders might call his behaviour transvestite),
> and one of the worst movie directors all times. Well, Uwe Boll might
> be worse for sure.
>
> But I really cannot see how how came to understand uri's sentence as
> inferring.
> 3 adjectives, without apparent connection.
> --
> Reini
>
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-- 
John Haugeland
Crowdtilt <http://crowdtilt.com/> is what I do
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