as small as a world and as large as alone, glintglimmergleam: never, ever put any blogger...

7:48pm May 1, 2014

never, ever put any blogger on a pedestal

don’t put any thinker on a pedestal

we’re all on our own learning curves here; everyone is massively ignorant on at least one issue and overcoming that as they can

judge someone not on what they don’t know or misconstrue, but how they respond to (or ignore) valid criticism

I get very nervous when I get some responses to my writing. Like I wrote that post on death, and I’m very happy with the post, I think it’s one of the most important things I’ve ever written. But someone said she was going to take it “as her bible” and didn’t seem to understand why I found that incredibly alarming.

It’s hard to know how to tell people “I can make mistakes, huge mistakes, please don’t take everything I say as absolute truth.” I told her that, and she said she didn’t see anything wrong with what I wrote. And maybe there was nothing wrong, it’s just the principle of the thing.

I don’t always judge people on how they respond to valid criticism, though. Because sometimes it’s very hard to tell the difference between valid criticism and malice, especially when someone is deliberately blurring the lines. And some people err on the side of believing things said in malice as if they were valid criticism (according to my friends, that’s where I generally go), but other people err on the side of dismissing valid criticism as malicious.

And what’s really tricky is that genuinely malicious people will attack you in horrible, underhanded ways. And then they’ll smile sweetly and say “What, you can’t take a little disagreement? What’s wrong with you, you must have such a big ego.” When what they’re doing isn’t disagreement at all. My bullies love to do this thing where they maliciously bully me (or someone else), then if I tell them they’re out of line, they say (to me and to the rest of the world) that I “can’t handle disagreement”, or even that I “bully and abuse them” by telling them they’re out of line and that I’m not going to listen to them.

One time there was this guy who was guilt-tripping a group of autistic people for not responding to his posts. He was alternating between becoming enraged with us, and telling us what awful people we were for not responding to him. So I wrote up what I thought was a very polite explanation for why autistic people can’t just respond to things on demand, and why increasing the pressure to respond only makes it harder for many of us to respond. Several people agreed with me that the reasons I gave were why they were not responding. This guy then accused me of “bullying” him and “abusing” him and “ganging up on” him. He had been sending truly bullying and abusive private emails to me and some other people on the list, and when we told the moderator, the moderator had him banned. He proceeded to blame me (even though I was far from the only person he was doing this to), and began publicly bullying me and calling me a fraud, all the way accusing me of bullying and abusing him.

Anyway, his big thing is saying that I “become abusive in response to disagreement” and that I “can’t handle a little disagreement”. The thing is, invariably the “disagreement” that I “can’t handle” is having him publicly denounce me as a fraud who fakes autism for my own gain and abuses people. That’s not disagreement. It’s not even constructive criticism. It’s a personal attack, and I have no obligation to “handle” it.

Many people in the situation I’ve been in there, will then go to a point where they really don’t handle disagreement well. Because when you’re the target of a dedicated smear campaign, it can be extremely hard to differentiate between someone who disagrees with you and is pissed off at you for valid reasons, and someone who is personally attacking you and using ‘disagreement’ as a cover story. And as I said, some people, including me, tend to respond to such situations by painstakingly replying to every hostile email we get, as if the hostility was all meant in good faith. But many other people will respond to such a situation in the opposite direction: They will assume bad faith even when it comes to a legitimate disagreement.

It gets especially tricky when someone is both disagreeing with you on something, and angry and somewhat snappish and irritable and maybe even snarky towards you. Because they may have a valid point buried under all the hostility, and you don’t want to ignore them just because their tone isn’t perfectly calm. But on the other hand, their “disagreement” may just be their way of getting close enough to you to hurt you on purpose. They may be taking a perverse pleasure out of watching you jump through hoops trying to be “fair” and “nice” to them.

So I understand why some people eventually start assuming bad faith when they encounter legitimate disagreement. Especially if they have been the target of intense cyberbullying. It can be hard to walk that line.

That said, the (sub)cultural automatic presumption of bad faith in a wide variety of situations, as seen on tumblr and other places, bothers me deeply. But that’s another post for another time.