"Nick" wrote in message
oups.com...
Steven B Dowd (aka ) wrote:
Nick wrote:
(The context was snipped by Steven B Dowd.)
In my view, Zsuzsa Polgar is a woman who's
completely capable of looking after the best
interests of herself and her family. She does
not need and I doubt that she appreciates
any strangers telling her how to manage her
personal relationship with Paul Truong.
Your view is not well-respected here - or probably anywhere -
I prefer to regard Zsuzsa Polgar as a woman who knows her
own mind and who's capable of looking after the best interests
of herself and her family. Some other writers apparently prefer
to treat Zsuzsa Polgar as though she were a helpless child
who must be 'protected' from the supposedly malign influence
of Paul Truong, whom those writers apparently loathe.
I suffer the disadvantage of knowing them both - they seem unacquainted with
their suffering.
People loathe Truong for the same reasons they loathe Evans, Keene,
Schiller, Parr... because all these people are openly critical of a
political class in chess who serve mostly themselves - indeed, on the whole,
they only talk with each other - and from one administration to the next,
despite however much money is in the pot, nothing changes for the better.
and as a public figure Polgar must expect that such things
will be discussed;
Yes, I think there is an expectation - though that is not to say that much
of these speculations are decent or honorable! And are usually a failure to
get things in perspective - the relative weight of the life to the art, and
also of public to private affairs.
This is resolved in the speculator, rather than elsewhere, since if writers
do not display some adequate level of human understanding, then such
'expectation' can have little of value, [can it?] other than to distort how
things actually are.
Then Zsuzsa Polgar should know that Steven B Dowd
apparently feels entitled to unleash his conjectures
about her personal life, if not also his conjectures
about her state of mind.
Although not a specific to Dowd, I think her opinion of many such newsgroup
'expectations' is, quote, 'vile'.
For myself, I think some of this has to do with celebrity and some to do
with gender. Clearly women in American society suffer more unwelcome and
unwonted attention than men, but the larger fact may be an overemphasis on
status, and people here obsess about that.
Psychologically, the mechanism is very similar if you either like or dislike
some fixation - what becomes disturbed is a proportion of things, with some
part inflated so that it occupies more space than is warranted [ 'a
glamour' ] while other parts are diminished or absented entirely ['a
repression' ].
An interesting way to explore this is to attempt to talk about yourself! How
honestly could you exclaim on your own life, love, art, and their
inter-relation? How much of yourself is mysterious?!
Idiotically in this instance, Dr D can't even use his own name, or personal
circumstance, and merely indicates his magnificance to us mortals, rather
than quite engaging with us with perspectives from his own life. These
vicarious excursions into the lives of others are become commonplace in
society and so in newsgroups too, but really are no more than an inability
to make sense of one's own life and affairs, and a flight into a fantasy
about the lives of others.
whether it fits your narrow ethical and world view or not
is also irrelevant.
"I know from long experience that there is nothing
at all between Dr. (Steven B) Dowd's ears."
--Kenneth Sloan (14 June 2006)
Now go somewhere and proclaim someone "beyond disdain,"
one of your favorite hobbies.
To correct Steven B Dowd's distortion of *exactly* what
I have written, I have written that some writers in RGC*
'warrant no response beyond disdain', which pertains
to what they have written.
I extended Dr D an invitation to evaluate his own knowledge, indeed, so that
his own disdain at other's could be placed into a perspective, and thereby
he could gain some sense of proportion of the worth of other people to
exist?
A specific on Soviet-era affairs was if he had read the Gulko MSS, but in
his response he eliminated even the question, while maintaining his
superiority over others by putting them down, absent any content.
What seems most 'disdained' beyond individual behaviors, is the worth of
knowledge and an insistent preference to speculations, which must be termed
'idle' in the absense of real knowledge - and this is not just information,
but material taken in as a human being, digested and matured by reflection,
and so understood in that context.
Why anyone at all on this Planet should argue or behave as if they have not
exactly the same circumstances of human evaluation as anyone else is a
neurotic activity. To indulge and persist in it is psychotic.
Phil Innes
--Nick