Lisa said
fairly pointless to try to hold a rational conversation with them, because
they literally can't do it
Thanks Lisa, I think that's a very compassionate way of expressing a very difficult dilemma. It implies not 'willfully refuses to...' but '(temporarily) lacks ability to...'. Hope I'm not putting words in your mouth.
Alison
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Alison Page wrote:
It implies not 'willfully refuses to...' but '(temporarily) lacks ability to...'. Hope I'm not putting words in your mouth.
That's about the size of it. Of course, both types are out there, and it can be difficult to distinguish the "willfully irrational" from the "involuntarily irrational" because the former often imitate the style of the latter, sometimes quite effectively. (After some 19 years online, I find that they all look very much alike anyway.) However, the best response is the same in either case, so there's no need to make extensive attempts at diagnosis unless you really like that sort of thing.
- Lisa
-- Lisa Williams: lisa@eroicafans.org or lcw@dallas.net Lisa's Video Frame Capture Library: http://framecaplib.com/ From Eroica With Love: http://eroicafans.org/
From: Lisa Williams lisa@eroicafans.org
That's about the size of it. Of course, both types are out there, and it can be difficult to distinguish the "willfully irrational" from the "involuntarily irrational" because the former often imitate the style of the latter, sometimes quite effectively. (After some 19 years online, I find that they all look very much alike anyway.) However, the best
response
is the same in either case, so there's no need to make extensive attempts at diagnosis unless you really like that sort of thing.
Furthermore, when one comes to suspect that the latter might well be the case, there develops an ethical imperative not to aggravate the situation further, no matter how great the degree of provocation, past, present or future.
Neil
-
Alison Page -
Lisa Williams -
Neil Faulkner