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Your argument suggests a certain naïveté, or else a desire to claim there is no subtext whatsoever in organizing a mob to serve as the medium of the "communicat

by aaronem 13y ago

Your argument suggests a certain naïveté, or else a desire to claim there is no subtext whatsoever in organizing a mob to serve as the medium of the "communication" to which you refer. Whatever the overt message, and especially when the purported message is as confused and vaguely threatening as in this case, in the act of arranging that someone should awaken, to find a crowd surrounding his house and shouting imprecations, there cannot but be a subtextual implication which amounts to "And you'd better listen to us, or else!" Of course, I'm sure that, finding yourself in the position poor Levandowski did, your first instinct would be to argue semantics with the mob! What more reasonable response, after all, could there possibly be? And what more reasonable creature, than a shouting mob, with which to carry on such a discussion?

diydsp 13y ago
My argument parrots the dictionary. Yours smuggles in all kinds of baggage, such using a weak definition of the word "mob" while implying the strongest and saying "surrounding" when they were likely only in front of. Your suggestion that a subtext exists would be useful if there were a history of protestors at Google employee's houses. However, there is none beyond what you are imagining in your creative (how do you evidence your statement that they were shouting?) mind. In fact, now that a peaceful demonstration has taken place outside a Google employee's house, a precedent has begun to form in which the subtext is that employees should NOT feel threatened by protestors. I would not have realized this myself had not you not mistakenly claimed its opposite, so thank you and have an up vote.
- aaronem 13y ago
  You talk of parroting the dictionary as though that were desirable. While a dictionary is a good and useful thing, there is much of value which is not to be found in such a book. In particular, a dictionary concerns itself with what a given word is currently agreed upon to mean, and not with the history of the phenomenon that word might happen to denote; your apparent desire to constrain such historical consideration, to include only incidents in which a protest occurs at a Google employee's house, is quite neat, I suppose, in that it neatly sidesteps any concern over the implicit threat of violence which is part and parcel of any deployment of the tactic. But I don't find such circumscribed historiography particularly compelling.

by aaronem 13y ago

diydsp 13y ago

My argument parrots the dictionary. Yours smuggles in all kinds of baggage, such using a weak definition of the word "mob" while implying the strongest and saying "surrounding" when they were likely only in front of. Your suggestion that a subtext exists would be useful if there were a history of protestors at Google employee's houses. However, there is none beyond what you are imagining in your creative (how do you evidence your statement that they were shouting?) mind. In fact, now that a peaceful demonstration has taken place outside a Google employee's house, a precedent has begun to form in which the subtext is that employees should NOT feel threatened by protestors. I would not have realized this myself had not you not mistakenly claimed its opposite, so thank you and have an up vote.

aaronem 13y ago
You talk of parroting the dictionary as though that were desirable. While a dictionary is a good and useful thing, there is much of value which is not to be found in such a book. In particular, a dictionary concerns itself with what a given word is currently agreed upon to mean, and not with the history of the phenomenon that word might happen to denote; your apparent desire to constrain such historical consideration, to include only incidents in which a protest occurs at a Google employee's house, is quite neat, I suppose, in that it neatly sidesteps any concern over the implicit threat of violence which is part and parcel of any deployment of the tactic. But I don't find such circumscribed historiography particularly compelling.