"Ahem"...clearing my voice..."ahem"...

OK, let's get serious.  On a regular basis, P. Krugman observes an event sequence that already must have brought Socrates to desperation. Here is Krugman's description:

"It goes like this: Person A says 'Black is white' — perhaps out of ignorance, although more often out of a deliberate effort to obfuscate. Person B says, 'No, black isn’t white — here are the facts.'
 And Person B is considered to have lost the exchange — you see, he came across as arrogant and condescending."

Krugman has tons of these examples on his blog. Here is another example, closer to home: On this blog, in the post "German for beginners (3)", we associate three lines from the washed-up scriptwriter "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore"...where was I...I meant "Vom Eise befreit..." with a picture of two deer stalking through a thick cover of snow. Then we translate these lines with Google, and the result is gibberish. Subsequently, we first blame the poor scriptwriter for his poor poetry and then blame him for the mismatch between his lines and the winter-deer-picture.

And it happens all the time. And the poor scriptwriter always loses.

-"You are doing this to me all the time!"
-"No, it's YOU, you are doing this to me all the time!"
-"That's what I said."