Attacked Again By My Personal Demon

It is a demon that mocks me in my efforts to increase wider understandings, understandings that were made possible by God having gifted me with a mind that notices things, has a long memory, and quickly ties various and disparate events and things together.

The demon's damage is made worse by it knowing how how it bothers me and stymies in my efforts out of my fear that my efforts might increase misunderstandings inadvertently or clumsily. You cannot un-ring a bell, and it's terribly hard to rewind an untensioned spool that's slipped its retainer.

For those who do me the honor of coming here to read my blather, I am going to show you why I so often shut down and not write anything more than short comments at other sites for long periods of time. I have a fear of making large mistakes and missing them, then have those mistakes go on to proliferate to have a life of their own, spreading more misinformation.

Beginning with a simple comment I left at Gates of Vienna in hopes of alerting historian Seneca III to an unfavorable use of his famous name, I made my first mistake of going into details in a follow-up comment that I specifically chose to do in order to spell out the threat to the author's name (guilt by association that could be stemmed with what I was demonstrating) more concisely.

The second mistake, had it been made only once, could be written off to maybe a typographical one that the spell-checker fixed, but which I did not notice. Yet even then, because the word used so destroys the understanding of the sentence, I still should have caught it. Worse. I did it more than once!

Here is the mea culpa I left at GoV (edited due to more errors! in the one posted there).

OMG. Several days late I have noticed that I made an awful error, and not just once.

In each instance where I typed “explicit,” the term I had intended was “extrinsic.”

I am not terribly prone to Malaprop, but this one being part of a quite esoteric subject with which I hoped to improve understanding of how the anti-theists without merit seek to exploit the name of Seneca, I find it terribly embarrassing.

However, my personal embarrassment by exposing it is less important than the stopping the propagation of misinformation just in case anybody is paying attention.

Extrinsic* (and not explicit) is the unwelcome parasitic property that seeks to attach itself to the intrinsic*.

The following line is the correct one:

I point to how Pascal was clearly irked by how extrinsic probabilism used by the Casuists seated at the Sorbonne crowded out all of the originals’ intrinsic substance.

This is why I say I’m best in providing insights rather than details where, echoing S III’s words, the damnable creeps in. And it also demonstrates why I dislike writing so. This shows why writing is, for me, a form of penance. Penance for the propaganda delivery system that I helped make possible, yes. But also penance for mostly making a living in my pre-retirement years and not battling the Statists in a more proportionate level to that which they attacked what I hold dear.

Thank you for your understanding.

Thank you too, dear readers, for putting up with my frailties.

*

Intrinsic properties of an argument are the details that constitute it and for what it provides a substantive answer -- and what it is limited to achieving. Intrinsic properties of a house are how it is built, and why, and in the case of one treasured for its comforts, what is in it.
Intrinsic properties are what gives something real value. It is about substance.

Extrinsic properties of an argument are what battles it won or who used the argument or what it claims to achieve. Extrinsic properties of a house would include who owned it or slept there, or how pretty it looks, irrespective to its current usefulness or desirability to provide living comfort.
Extrinsic properties are what provides the appearance of value. It is about a facade.