1:33am August 16, 2012

Those of you who worship at the alter of Rachel Cohen-Rotenberg can unfollow me now.

sherlocksflataffect:

If she’s going to block me & then use my writing as examples of hateful dangerous extremeism (on a media where I can’t see it, see ‘blocked me’), she is a fucking bully, & anyone who is ok with that I do not want as a friend.

6 months+ of this shit, I am over it.

I wasn’t following you anyway (due to triggering stuff) and I wasn’t there for whatever happened, nor have I heard any description of it before now.  But I don’t personally think it’s bullying for someone to decide I or you or anyone else is hateful or their viewpoints dangerous, and express that publicly or privately. There are other things that in the same context would be bullying but what you’ve described, from your description, isn’t it.  Especially given that I can see a lot of valid reasons for, if someone saw you that way, wanting to keep their distance and discuss things only when and where they felt like it. 

I also can’t – just can’t – handle situations where people try to force me to choose between them and someone else over something I consider more of a personal falling out than anything else. I used to be part of a group of online friends where everyone (but me, apparently) fell out with everyone else. I ended up losing those friends. All of them. Because I could not handle two or three groups of people each demanding that I acknowledge that all the other groups of people were bullies and sociopaths. Especially when I knew full well that none of them were sociopaths and few of them were bullies. So I left. I walked away rather than let myself get manipulated into declaring one set of friends the good ones and another the horrible bullies.

I also consider it a serious warning sign when people are referred to as someone’s “worshippers”.  I’m going to make it clear:  I don’t worship her. I barely know her. I do like her. I just don’t think, from your description, that whatever she did was unforgivable. Blocking people is almost always okay regardless of reason, that’s just a right people have. Talking about seeing someone’s views as hateful or dangerous is usually okay, as long as it’s a genuine belief, and I have never known her to not be genuine. Not being up to expressing that to someone’s face is also okay. Not everyone is up for a fight all the time. 

If that means I lose my friendship with you then I’m okay with that.  She isn’t really close enough to be my friend. And I like you. But I don’t take well to ultimatums over what looks like a form of falling-out I’ve seen many times before without someone necessarily being a bully.  I’m being asked to choose sides over something that I didn’t see and of which there are many possible interpretations other than bullying.  And I already know that my idea of a “fucking bully” and yours are sometimes different enough that I can’t just go by your judgement and assume I’d judge the same. 

Plus, I guess it’s been at the back of my mind that eventually I’d lose your friendship anyway. Because our judgements of things aren’t just quite different at times. They’re mutually incompatible. It’s a fact whether either one of us likes it or not.  My only options are either to avoid certain issues, twist my ethics into unacceptable forms of knots, or eventually face the fact that we’re just not compatible even at the fairly distant kind of casual friendship we’ve had. 

And I’d rather face that fact now than wait till later. I’d rather take the wrong end of this ultimatum than wait for a different ultimatum. Ultimatums that to you are all about the only way to be a decent person but to me, the only way I can be a decent person is to just acknowledge I’m on the wrong side of you.  I can’t deal with the rigidity of your ethics in certain areas. This is the fundamental incompatibility.  I can’t go by that rigidity without compromising the flexibility that I can’t do ethics without.  

And I can’t go along with the thing where you’ll actually attack someone (not just justifiable anger) and then if anyone so much as whispers that you’ve done something wrong, then they are always the problem.  Always.  So you can attack someone however you want to, but even saying that you’ve done something wrong is an attack on you, and when you do something to someone else it’s justified and when they do it to you it’s an attack, and the fact that everyone attacks you (well you do get real attacks a lot, but you don’t always differentiate between the real ones and people saying “hey you’re hurting people slow down”) justifies you attacking people and it goes on and on like that.  Which is a really scary system because it means you can always justify what you do. Even if it harms people. (I don’t think your intent is to harm people, either, I just think you’re pissed off.)   And after enough people see you doing something like that, I can understand why someone who saw you as wrong in these ways would want to avoid you and only talk about their views in private. I respect you enough that I’m telling you directly rather than just disappearing on you, and I hope you understand that.  But I’m prepared for the possibility of being relegated to the list of Bad People in the world, because if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t say it. 

And I don’t hate you or have it in for you or anything else. Nor does this mean that I really was calling you an asshole the other day, I really was just taking you literally all the times you’ve said repeatedly that you’re an asshole, fueled by spite/rage/etc. and thought that this was genuinely your take on activism.  (Because it really is a lot of people’s take on activism ever since the “angry radical activist” stereotype was created by the FBI to destroy radical activism, and some actual would-be activists believed it was for real and emulated it.  And I thought who you were responding to were those parents on Facebook that have been giving people a hard time – I don’t have Facebook so I get out of the loop a lot.) And this isn’t and has never been about tone (not even the “attack” part). I just know that as we are right now, we aren’t compatible even for a loose casual friendship, and I’d rather tell you directly and in public why, than run and hide Like some people who have made similar realizations choose to do.  And as someone with my particular ethics, I also feel the need to say something when I see someone doing harm, even if they’re my friend. Usually my friendships survive it (including other people saying the same to me), sometimes they don’t. 

(To anyone reading this:  I don’t care if you like me and also like sherlocksflataffect. That’s fine. I don’t want you to judge between us by tone, or judge between us at all if you don’t feel like it.)  

And unfortunately I’m going to have to block you.  Which won’t prevent you seeing what I write of course.  It just prevents me seeing what you write.  I hate to do that. But I am in a really shitty situation where I simultaneously see the need to say what I’ve said, and also really really can’t deal with a drawn out discussion. I won’t blame you if you block or unfollow me, your choice. Or if anyone else does. I really wish I could give this the discussion time it requires. I’ve given it as much as I can. But I can’t give it more because I’m completely trashed and I just can’t.  Sometimes timing sucks and there are no good choices. Getting out of this NOW rather than later is another thing that’s for the sake of my health as much as anything.  This is a last straw kind of deal, even if you could never see the straws you were piling up.  I probably don’t see you in an identical way to how she sees you, FWIW, but I can see that we probably both saw the same thing and went different directions from similar roots. Sorry again, especially for having to do this in such a messy shitty way. Wish it had been different.

There were no “good” choices.

11 notes