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12:53pm September 5, 2014

lichgem replied to your post: alliecat-person: Apparently I missed …

To be honest it feels like someone was trying to create an argument so they could hold it up as proof of something… it feels kind of like a part of something else. But I’m maybe reading too deeply into it.,

Yes, it felt like that to me, too.

It felt like I was being manipulated in some way, in order to prove a point, that would then be attached to some other point, later on.

And I don’t like that feeling.

I get responses like that sometimes, here and on my other blog, and there’s no way to prove that they are what they are.  There never is.  But I distrust them deeply.

But always, always, they’re written in such a way that I will look bad if I respond with anything other than pure loving graciousness.

That part annoys me the most sometimes.  The idea that because I’m a blogger or something, I have to be always “on”.  Always helpful and happy and never grumpy or annoyed or anything.  Like if I’m not superhumanly polite all the time, then someone can claim I’m a horrible person forever.

And that’s not how the world works.  In the real world, even best friends yell at each other sometimes.  And then they make up and move on.   People are not machines.  We are not endless fountains of happiness and graciousness and understanding.  We have feelings and not all of our feelings are pleasant ones, and we’re not always going to be expressing pleasant feelings.

And somehow, in offline relationships, people tend to grasp this.  They can see someone is having a bad day and give them the benefit of the doubt.  But in the online world, if you have a fight, it’s forever, and it’s somehow more powerful than a fight in the offline world.  I mean it’s not this way for everyone, obviously.  But it seems to happen more readily online.

And a worrying thing about what happens online is that it’s not just fights between two people.  People choose sides.  People stay on the same sides.  Schisms develop.  And it’s usually over something trivial and stupid like someone had a bad day and wasn’t 100% polite to someone else, and then all their friends decided that person was a bad person, and all the other person’s friends decided the other person was a bad person, and then all their friends start fighting each other, it’s horrible.