![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More on that "unfair criticism" thing.
May. 17th, 2011 02:01 amSo, I went back to the comments and found what is pretty much the nuclear option: one of the guys I tangled with accused me of preventing negative comments so I could only have praise.
Well, he's on his third or fourth comment in the thread so I'm doing a bang-up job of that, clearly.
My reply to him has gone through several multiple oh-so-many edits, because every time I tried to trim it down a little bit and tone it down a little I ended up adding three paragraphs and inventing new languages to abuse him in.
Because to me, this is the mother of all unfair criticism. If I had deleted his first negative comment and blocked him... this would have been over the weekend... then today (Monday, I mean) would have been very different. He wouldn't have come and made another comment expanding on his views, I wouldn't have torn into him, there wouldn't have been a whole thread with people either agreeing with him or supporting him against my defensiveness in general...
Basically, this whole thing would have been avoided if I were the person he's accusing me of being. So it's not only an unfair criticism, it's a bitterly ironic one.
And yes, yes, I know that if I were the perfectly rational person I most assuredly am not, if I had some more self-control, if I'd avoided looking at the comments until after I finished writing, then what he said or didn't say wouldn't matter in the slightest.
But you have to go to write with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.
Anyway, here's my new policy I'm going to try out, and that's venting here instead of unloading in the comment replies. Venting with a side of self-reflection of why I need to vent, of what's pissing me off about the comment. If I feel there's something that needs to be communicated I can do that after I've worked things out.
Well, he's on his third or fourth comment in the thread so I'm doing a bang-up job of that, clearly.
My reply to him has gone through several multiple oh-so-many edits, because every time I tried to trim it down a little bit and tone it down a little I ended up adding three paragraphs and inventing new languages to abuse him in.
Because to me, this is the mother of all unfair criticism. If I had deleted his first negative comment and blocked him... this would have been over the weekend... then today (Monday, I mean) would have been very different. He wouldn't have come and made another comment expanding on his views, I wouldn't have torn into him, there wouldn't have been a whole thread with people either agreeing with him or supporting him against my defensiveness in general...
Basically, this whole thing would have been avoided if I were the person he's accusing me of being. So it's not only an unfair criticism, it's a bitterly ironic one.
And yes, yes, I know that if I were the perfectly rational person I most assuredly am not, if I had some more self-control, if I'd avoided looking at the comments until after I finished writing, then what he said or didn't say wouldn't matter in the slightest.
But you have to go to write with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.
Anyway, here's my new policy I'm going to try out, and that's venting here instead of unloading in the comment replies. Venting with a side of self-reflection of why I need to vent, of what's pissing me off about the comment. If I feel there's something that needs to be communicated I can do that after I've worked things out.
