h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well I redid the entry.
It turned out not soo much needed changing, just some italics here and there, some heading, and a few links to keep the surfers going.

What say you? Are we there?

Did you re-post your article at a different address? What I find is substantially the same as I remember from the first reading.

Barton

Well, no Barton, and you're right, it didn't change as much as I thought it would. Thing is, though I thought I had the 'being honest about dishonesty' bit woven all through the article, which I wanted to change after your remark, it was in fact only really present in this paragraph:

"The fact that these two words exist in Japanese is a fascinating thing. Here is a society that can be seen by outsiders as, by way of vocabulary, being honest about casual dishonesty. To themselves, however, it is more the acknowledgement of there being more than one mode of honesty entirely."

Well by changing that paragraph into an opposition of outisder/Japanese views on honesty in its entirety, I think I amended the ethnocentrism in the earlier version sufficiently. Your remark concerned an important miswriting, but a miswriting that was easier to correct than I thought.

After that it was just adding some headers and some links.

Very well then. I still think that the potential for misunderstanding is there, but then I would not have thought to write that article at all. You do what seems right to you.

You should go in and do a bit more cleaning up of your paragraph structure. Are you using pairs or sets. I recommend the second option. Your article will look much better. Remember, it is not likely that most people have their browsers set up the same way you do, don't try to do to much hard formatting unless you want to use the option around all your work.

And there are still a few typos to catch.

Barton

Potential for misunderstanding? I thought I had worked around it enough. Please elaborate, because it is a tricky concept I'm trying to bring home to the reader, and misunderstandings are the last thing I'd want to have.

Paragraphs. Typos. Will do.

Here goes: What I think I am really objecting too is what appears to be a desire on your part to hang on to your deliberate oxymoron, honest dishonesty. My point was/is that they are both honest. To be fair we probably need to separate 'honest' from 'true'. Rather than do this whole thing over again, I invite you to visit my 'space' and read the article there. But here is an example and discussion of what I mean in your article.

"by way of two words, diametrically opposed to each other"

They are not diametrically opposed other. They represent two distinct approaches to life, yes, but those views are not oppositional even though they may appear contradictory out of context.

"Here is a society that can be seen by outsiders as, by way of vocabulary, being honest about casual dishonesty."

You suggest that, first, there is dishonesty when in fact contradictory staments are both honest in context. For instance, the same person can say, at work, 'I think you are a fine manager, very efficient.' And at a private bar, away from the work group, 'I don't much care for the way you manage, you are too concerned with efficiency.' In the former he is speaking as someone who expects that work must be completed and concerns about efficientcy are appropriate to a manager. In the latter, he is stating that human issues need to be considered as well. To have said the latter in the office would be to impose a personal relationship on the work situation. To say the former in the latter situation would indeed be dishonest since he would be sucking up.

"the western mindset does not allow for two realities to exist on an equal level."
This is a valid observation which implies that one can be honest in each reality yet say different things. The word 'real' is key since you use it in a relative rather than absolute sense. Note that this contradicts the previous quote.

"For the Japanese, honne is not more real, only perhaps more true to the thoughts of a person."
Here you contradict yourself in the same sentence by confusing, in your own mind, the concept of truth and reality, treating them as equivalent when you have used them differently in the previous quote.
Your first clause is correct. Your second clause is a value judgement based on the assumption that this person's real thoughts are contradictory which they are not. And contradictory in a deliberate or calculated fashion, that is 'dishonest' which they are also not.

Re-examine the example you give at the end of the article for these exact points.

"But morals are sometimes *for* from social proceedings." Without close reading, the marked word is the only typo I found. There may be more.

Barton

------------------------
You may feel that I am quibbling from a private philosophical

It¡¦s not lighter than the globe an undertaking.

Their recent election is an ill-designed poll. Humble suggestion is a serious poll or referendum, how the nationals prefer the WWII to really end, as we see it hasn¡¦t, bearing in mind


everything is IN THE FACE OF THE SPECIES.


Their avangarde feminism is grand tho.